The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  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 (Joshua 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. This makes it feel a bit patchwork, and the TV segments undercut the tension of the main narrative, but the film has weird energy to burn and a career-best performance from Barbara Crampton. The whole cast is great, but Crampton is incredibly funny and menacing, 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.

  Fantastic Fest 2017: Day 3

  Originally published on Daily Grindhouse 4 October 2017

  Top Knot Detective (Australia, dir. Aaron McCann & Dominic Pearce)

  Briefly aired on Australian television in the early 90s and lost except for VHS recordings from that era, the Japanese TV series Top Knot Detective became a cult sensation among those lucky few who managed to see it. The documentary of the same name is a deep dive into the history of the show, the corporation that created it, and the troubled star whose bad boy behavior off-screen helped make it a success. It’s a fantastic documentary, but what makes it really astonishing is that it’s 100% false. Filmmakers Aaron McCann & Dominic Pearce created a ton of totally convincing archival material for the film ranging from Japanese celebrity magazine layouts to TV interviews from the era when the show aired and the crowning achievement of clips from episodes of Top Knot Detective. It’s a seriously incredible feat of carefully detailed study and invention, and if it wasn’t entirely fabricated it would be one of the best documentaries of the year. As it is, it will have to settle for just being one of the funniest films of the year, a riotous celebration of Japanese pop culture and the strange things that work their way into cult consciousness.

  Firstborn (Latvia, dir. Aik Karapetian)

  Meek architect Francis (Kaspars Znotins) and his wife Katrina (Maija Doveika) are assaulted by a young biker on their walk home from a friend’s dinner party. The police, including Katrina’s ex-boyfriend who is now a detective, aren’t very helpful. Francis, desperate to prove his manhood to Katrina, sets out to find the biker himself. He manages to find the young man, but a shocking accident puts an abrupt end to their meeting. Nine months later, Katrina is about to give birth and the couple have moved into a new building. Everything is going well until a box arrives at their front door, the contents of which send a very clear and chilling message to Francis: His business with the biker is not finished. Writer/director Aik Karapetian’s previous film, the surreal horror The Man in the Orange Jacket, brought him to the notice of genre fans worldwide. Firstborn is not quite as defiantly strange as that film, unfortunately to its detriment. The score and sound design in this film are excellent and effective in creating an unsettling atmosphere, and the film looks fantastic. Despite being technically impressive, though, Firstborn is a familiar revenge thriller. Nothing in the story is terribly memorable, although there are tense moments and the film as a whole is well-executed. Karapetian has the makings of a great genre stylist, and anyone interested in international genre cinema should have him on their radar.

  Gemini (USA, dir. Aaron Katz)

  Jill (Lola Kirke) is the personal assistant to actress Heather (Zoë Kravitz), whose career is heating up just as she feels the need to take a break. She’s just left her actor boyfriend Devin (Reeve Carney) and is trying to protect her new girlfriend Tracy (Greta Lee) from the public eye. The morning after Heather asks to borrow Jill’s gun, Jill walks into the house where Heather is staying and finds her dead: shot multiple times with Jill’s gun. When the police arrive, Jill is questioned by Detective Ahn (John Cho) and quickly realizes she’s the top suspect in the murder. With time ticking down until the cops find her, Jill decides to change her look and investigate the murder herself, which goes about as well as one might expect. Gemini is a loose, shaggy quasi-detective story that plays like a sunny California companion to writer/director Aaron Katz’s previous feature Cold Weather. Both films feature a central mystery and a wildly unqualified amateur investigator, although with its Los Angeles sheen Gemini feels a little more polished and a little less overtly comic. It’s still often very funny, with great small roles for James Ransone as a sleazy paparazzo and Nelson Franklin as a cranky screenwriter. Both films are also beautifully shot by Andrew Reed, who uses Los Angeles as a backdrop just as expertly as he did with Portland in Cold Weather. Gemini look and investigate the murder herself, which goes about as well as one might expect. Gemini is being misleadingly marketed as a slick thriller, which is probably going to result in a lot of head-scratching from audiences looking for the super-cool “Neon Noir” its trailer suggests. Katz is more interested in his characters and their relationships than the crime that puts them into motion or the resolution of that central mystery. It’s more akin to something like Altman’s The Long Goodbye, which functions as a mystery but is clearly more concerned with other matters.

  1922 (USA, dir. Zak Hilditch)

  Wilfred James (Thomas Jane) checks into a hotel in Omaha and sits down to write a confession about the events of 1922, when he convinced his son Henry (Dylan Schmid) to help him murder the boy’s mother Arlette (Molly Parker) in order to keep their farmland from being sold to a slaughterhouse. This having taken place in the rural Midwest in the 20s, Wilfred doesn’t have a hard time getting away with it as far as the law goes. But the act has tragic consequences nonetheless, both in the psychic damage it does to both men and in a series of odd coincidences that may be simply that or may be a justice coming from beyond the grave. 1922 is an adaptation of a Stephen King novella, and as such it benefits from its source material’s solid structure and conversational storytelling style. Jane speaks in a raspy drawl, his voiceover omnipresent throughout the film, as if directly addressing the viewer using curious turns of phrase that reflect Wilfred’s background. There are some truly unsettling images in the film, including a recurring motif of rats in places they should not be, and it feels reminiscent of 80s/90s cable horror staples like The Curse. This is the kind of film viewers of a certain age would have caught on late-night cable when they were probably a bit too young to be watching it and it would scare the hell out of them. As such, 1922 is endearing in a similar way as deadly serious episodes of Tales from the Darkside, although its pretty photography and excellent score by Mike Patton lend it more gravitas than that might suggest.

  Brawl in Cell Block 99 (USA, dir. S. Craig Zahler)

  Bradley Thomas (Vince Vaughn) is laid off from his job as a mechanic and comes home to find his wife Lauren (Jennifer Carpenter) getting ready to visit her lover. After dismantling a large part of her car with his bare hands, Bradley sits down with Lauren and they talk over what they should do to fix their relationship--they still love each other, but they’ve grown apart and they genuinely want to get back to where they were. Bradley also reluctantly has to take work from Gil (Marc Blucas), an old friend and current low-level crime lord. Things go well for a while until Gil sets up Bradley to do a pickup with men sent by Eleazar (Dion Mucciacito), a bigger fish Gil wants to align himself with. Bradley ends up arrested when Eleazar’s men screw up the operation, and Eleazar is embarrassed and out a
lot of money. He presents Bradley with an ultimatum through his messenger the Placid Man (Udo Kier): Get transferred to a maximum security prison and kill a man, or Lauren and their unborn child die. S. Craig Zahler uses a similar approach to the prison/crime drama as he did with the Western in his debut feature Bone Tomahawk. The titular brawl doesn’t take place until the very end of the film; the first half of the movie is concerned with creating a complete picture of Bradley and his relationship with his wife. Vaughn gives what is pretty easily the best performance of his career here, giving Bradley both an imposing physical presence and a strangely comforting calm between explosions of gruesome violence. And make no mistake, there is plenty of really horrific violence here. As bloody as Bone Tomahawk was, the bodily harm done here is even more cringeworthy. While the gore, soul soundtrack, and weirdo side characters (including an abortionist known among the underground for his rare talents) are all lifted from 70s exploitation films, Zahler approaches Brawl in Cell Block 99 like a detailed, thoughtful character study about a principled man who happens to find himself in the middle of one of those ridiculous prison action movies and what he’s gonna do about it.

  Jailbreak (Cambodia, dir. Jimmy Henderson)

  Playboy (Savin Phillip), the public face of the infamous all-female Butterfly Gang, has been arrested and agrees to snitch on Madame Butterfly (Celine Tran), the real leader of the gang. Madame gets word to one of the gang leaders in the prison where Playboy is being transferred that he must be killed before he can testify, and the reward will be $200,000. The police team transporting Playboy includes Jean-Paul (Jean-Paul Ly), who has been transferred from Paris for some reason. The first part of the transfer goes smoothly, but once Playboy is in his cell the gang makes their move and the police must fight their way out of the prison and keep Playboy alive. Jailbreak is a highly entertaining martial arts action film that barely takes a breath once it gets all the pesky setup out of the way. Think of it as a cousin to The Raid, only made on a thrift-store budget and punctuated with some really goofy humor. Those aren’t complaints--it’s rare that a film including the sheer number of broken bones and busted faces as this one can be honestly described as “endearing,” but this certainly qualifies. There’s an infectious energy and enthusiasm here for the martial arts on display and action cinema that is undeniable. It’s not the most polished action movie out there, but Jailbreak is hands-down one of the most fun and purely entertaining action films of the year.

  Fantastic Fest 2017: Day 4

  Originally published on Daily Grindhouse 9 October 2017

  Blade of the Immortal (Japan, dir. Takashi Miike)

  After a cruel bounty hunter kills Machi (Hana Sugisaki), young sister of exiled samurai Manji (Takuya Kimura), Manji slaughters the man’s entire gang as revenge but suffers mortal wounds himself. As he is dying on the battlefield, a mysterious witch appears and grants Manji a dubious gift: immortality in the form of “bloodworms” that live in his body and quickly heal him whenever he is injured. Fifty years later, Rin (also Sugisaki) seeks out Manji to hire as a mercenary to take revenge for the death of her parents at the hands of Anotsu (Sôta Fukushi). Manji soon finds himself at war with Anotsu, who has embarked on a campaign to destroy the martial arts schools of the land and is determined to put an end to Manji’s meddling at any cost. Based on a popular manga, Blade of the Immortal is legendary director Takashi Miike’s 100th feature film and its scope is appropriately epic. The body count is easily in the hundreds as Manji slices his way through armies of men in protracted fight scenes, one of which ends with a literal river of blood flowing through the battlefield. Stylistically, the film resembles the relatively restrained period films Miike was making a few years ago like 13 Assassins and Hara-Kiri with a shot of the insane comic book violence for which he will probably always be best known. It’s packed with wild fights, gory action, weird characters, and dark humor--in other words, the things you hope to see in a Miike film. Here’s to 100 more!

  Love & Saucers (USA, dir. Brad Abrahams)

  David Huggins claims that he lost his virginity to an alien named Crescent when he was 17 years old. This was not the first time he had encountered extraterrestrials, and it was far from the last. Huggins became an artist and has painted numerous scenes related to his experiences with the alien beings, some of them of a sexual nature. Now 72, Huggins lives in Hoboken and works part-time at a deli. Love & Saucers is a warm and fascinating documentary about Huggins, his experiences, and his art. He describes his encounters with aliens in a completely matter-of-fact way, likely developed over a lifetime of having people react to him with disbelief. Director Brad Abrahams lets Huggins speak at length, and also talks to his friends and family, all of whom clearly love and respect him even if they don’t quite know what to make of his stories. It’s a fascinating look at a man who has a singular artistic vision, to say the least, and it raises interesting questions about belief and empathy. And, of course, aliens.

  Take It Out in Trade (USA, 1970, dir. Edward D. Wood, Jr.)

  The American Genre Film Archive (AGFA) and Something Weird Video (SWV) presented this film as a secret screening, and they managed to keep the secret all the way up until AGFA’s Joseph Ziemba and Lisa Petrucci of SWV gave a lengthy, thorough introduction to the film. Long thought lost, Take It Out in Trade was made when Ed Wood was transitioning to making hardcore sex films in the 1970s. Unlike those later films, though, this one has much more in common with the “nudie cuties” that were popular in the early 1960s--lots of groan-worthy dad jokes and puns, a goofy lead character mugging at the camera while endlessly peeping on nude women, wacky music, etc.--than the increasingly explicit adult films of the 70s. The only thing that really stands out as far as content goes is a few simulated sex scenes, one heterosexual (in which neither party is ever completely nude) and a few lesbian scenes (with explicit nudity but no “hardcore” shots). The setup follows detective Mac McGregor (Michael Donovan O'Donnell) who has been hired by a Los Angeles family to find their daughter, who has left home and set up shop at Penny’s, a popular brothel across town. He uses the expense account for the job to travel all over the world and peep on ladies in far-flung lands before finally coming back to find the young woman by working his contacts. These include drag queen Alecia (played by Wood himself!) and a happily married androgynous couple of indeterminate gender. The fact that neither Wood’s character nor the couple are played for jokes makes Take It Out in Trade feel weirdly progressive for a 70s sexploitation film, which makes sense given Wood had more or less free reign to do whatever he wanted. This would sadly be the last time he had such latitude, as following this he went on to make hardcore cheapies like Necromania and The Young Marrieds for hire. While it may be frequently very dull (a problem inherent to nearly all “nudie cuties”), there’s no question that AGFA and SWV’s discovery and restoration of Take It Out in Trade is hugely important and fills in a crucial missing piece of cult/exploitation film history.

  Gerald’s Game (USA, dir. Mike Flanagan)

  With their marriage on the rocks, Jessie (Carla Gugino) and Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) head to their remote Summer house for a weekend to spice things up. Unfortunately Gerald’s idea of just how to do that is very different from Jessie’s, and includes handcuffing her to the sturdy wooden posts of their bed. Even more unfortunately, Gerald keels over from a heart attack and tumbles to the floor, leaving Jessie shackled to the bed with no one coming to the house for weeks and no neighbors for miles. Jessie must confront a long-buried horror from her childhood in order to find the strength to free herself both physically and emotionally from the trauma that has unconsciously shaped her entire life. Gerald’s Game is a deft, ingenious adaptation of Stephen King’s novel from director/co-writer Mike Flanagan (Oculus) and his longtime screenwriting partner Jeff Howard. Carla Gugino gives an incredible, fearless performance. She’s on-screen for nearly every frame of the film, which like the novel on which it’s based is set largely in one room. It’s tense and scary even befor
e a single gruesome effect late in the film that makes an indelible impression--even the Fantastic Fest audience, veterans of all manner of horrors, had a hard time watching it. Nothing here is gratuitous, though, and despite the weird tonal shift at the end (which is directly from the book) there’s also nothing that doesn’t need to be here. This is one of the best Stephen King adaptations ever made, and certainly one of the best genre films of the year.

  Jupiter’s Moon (Hungary, dir. Kornél Mundruczó)

  Aryan (Zsombor Jéger) is traveling with his father from Serbia in hopes of finding refuge in Hungary, but during their illegal border crossing a firefight breaks out and Aryan loses track of his father in the confusion. A panicked police officer shoots Aryan and then flees before the wounded Aryan is mysteriously lifted into the air. After a crash landing, Aryan makes his way to the facility where his fellow illegals are being held and meets Dr. Gabor Stern (Merab Ninidze). Stern runs a sideline helping illegals give police the slip through the hospital where he works, but when he sees Aryan’s power he gets an idea for a much better grift. Aryan just wants to find his father, but with the police closing in and a terrorist plot in motion, even his newfound abilities may not be enough to save him. Jupiter’s Moon is Kornél Mundruczó’s follow-up to his international breakthrough White God, and it similarly blends a prosaic world and characters with fantastic events. The scenes of Aryan exercising his powers are a stark contrast to most “superhero” movies. He floats quietly, limbs swaying as though in water, with a look of calm. These inventively staged scenes are lyrical and meditative for the most part, although in one case he uses his ability to intimidate a skinhead to surprising effect. Jéger gives a powerful lead performance and Mónika Balsai, star of Liza the Fox-Fairy, appears in an excellent supporting role as Dr. Stern’s long-suffering lover. As beautiful and elegiac as it is, though, there is a glaring issue at the film’s core: Merab Ninidze’s voice is dubbed by another actor, András Bálint, and the effect is jarring. When Stern is speaking English, it’s not a problem, but whenever he’s speaking Hungarian, there is an extremely distracting disconnect between his words and his mouth. It’s an odd problem for a film that is otherwise excellent, and sadly detracts quite a bit from the experience.