Boys in the Trees (Australia, dir. Nicholas Verso)
It’s Halloween night in 1997, and Corey (Toby Wallace) is on the verge of making some big life changes. He’s applied to art school in New York, both because of his love of photography and his desire to get as far away as possible from the Australian town where he has grown up. But his “best friend” Jango (Justin Holborow) wants Corey to join the gang for another rowdy Halloween of terrorizing the locals, and Corey reluctantly agrees. Later that night Corey splits off and runs into his childhood friend Jonah (Gulliver McGrath), one of Jango’s favorite targets. Jonah challenges Corey to a reprise of a game they used to play as kids, setting off on an increasingly surreal journey through the lore of their town. Boys in the Trees is a dark coming of age tale with a surprisingly expansive scope for its confinement to the events of one evening. Wallace and McGrath provide solid leads, and Mitzi Ruhlmann has a small but memorable supporting role as Romany, a classmate of the boys who understands Corey’s desire to flee suburbia for something better. There is plenty of creepy imagery and a palpable sense of bittersweet nostalgia, but at nearly two full hours the film eventually starts to feel a bit too heavy for its own good. Regardless, Boys in the Trees is well worth a look and marks writer/director Nicholas Verso as a talent to watch.
Terror 5 (Argentina, dir. Sebastian & Federico Rotstein)
The verdict in a high-profile case of government corruption is about to come down, and the city is in turmoil. Protestors gather and the TV crews are out in force, but before the night is out that verdict is hardly going to be the biggest story. Terror 5 is an anthology of sorts with the outcome of the trial acting as the frame story, but the other stories are presented by cutting back and forth between some of them instead of as their own self-contained sequences. Each one is inspired by a different urban legend, but none of them really seem to complement each other in any meaningful way. Each story is frustratingly inert; nothing here is done particularly well, but the film is technically competent. The ending suggests the culmination of a political commentary that seems totally absent from the rest of the film, which traffics largely in exhausted horror tropes: snuff films, creepy hotels, hard-partying youths, and an army of the walking dead. Terror 5 never adds up to much, instead feeling like a jumble of disparate elements that never come together.
Two Pigeons (UK, dir. Dominic Bridges)
Hussein (Mim Shaikh) is a successful real estate agent with a carefully ordered home life and a complete lack of empathy or morality when it comes to his work. After he leaves for work one day, Orlan (Javier Botet) appears in Hussein’s apartment seemingly out of nowhere. Dirty and unkempt, Orlan sneaks around the apartment and carefully covers his tracks so Hussein won’t notice the intrusion. As days and weeks pass, Orlan starts sabotaging Hussein in subtle ways, earning him the wrath of his live-in girlfriend Mel (Mandeep Dhillon) and creepy boss Gerry (Michael McKell). Why is Orlan doing this, and where will it end? Debut feature director Dominic Bridges gives Two Pigeons an elaborately stylized look, which sometimes feels at odds with its dark but occasionally goofy humor. It’s all cold grays and smooth tracking shots, while Botet’s Orlan stalks around in filthy underwear and does unspeakable things with Hussein’s electric toothbrush. Anyone even remotely squeamish about such things should give this film a hard pass, as some of Orlan’s “pranks” are as disgusting as they are impressively imaginative. It’s actually easy to forget the entire film takes place within Hussein’s apartment, which is quite a feat. Botet and Shaikh’s characterizations are well-drawn and the tiny supporting cast all give great performances as well. It’s ultimately a long way to go for its final reveal, but Two Pigeons is an intriguing comedy/thriller with an uncommon sense of style.
Meatball Machine Kodoku (Japan, dir. Yoshihiro Nishimura)
Middle-aged Yuji (Yoji Tanaka) is having a pretty bad week. He hates his job as a debt collector and he’s really bad at it anyway. His aging mother is hitting him up for money, but he just maxed out his bank account. When he finds out he has cancer and only a short time to live, Yuji tries to turn his life around and meets young and beautiful Kaoru (Yurisa) just in time for a gigantic alien jar to fall from the sky and trap thousands of people in the city together. Soon alien parasites flood the streets, turning anyone infected into a biomechanical war machine with no purpose beyond fighting each other to the death. Yuji manages to retain his human consciousness and joins forces with a team of cops to save Kaoru from a city full of monsters. Director Yoshihiro Nishimura may be best known to American horror fans as director Tokyo Gore Police and Helldriver, but he’s been working in special effects since the 1980s on cult classics from Shozin Fukui’s Rubber’s Lover to Noboru Iguchi’s The Machine Girl and nearly every one of Sion Sono’s films. Nishimura worked on the original Meatball Machine shorts and feature film, and his return to this world is appropriately bonkers. There is an unbelievable amount of practical gore in this film, complemented by insane puppets and makeup effects and a generous helping of atrocious CGI. Anyone familiar with those earlier films will have a good idea what to expect here: lots of screaming, Power Rangers-style fights between monsters (with fountains of gore, that is), and a tender love story buried under all the viscera. Kodoku has more humor than 2005’s model of Meatball Machine, though, which helps keep things interesting when the film’s absurd oceans of gore threaten to become just exhausting. The Machine Girl is probably the best entry point to this kind of balls-out modern Japanese splatter epic, but Nishimura’s willingness to embrace the absurdity of the style makes Meatball Machine Kodoku a welcome change of pace from its contemporaries.
Festival Report: 2017 Boston Underground Film Festival
Originally published on Daily Grindhouse 26-27 May 2016
The Boston Underground Film Festival has returned to the historic Brattle Theatre for 2017! Billed as a “celebration of the bizarre and insane” and featuring “uncompromising, unflinching film/video,” the festival has earned a reputation for screening a wide variety of films from underground horror to top-tier documentary. This year’s lineup, running from March 22nd to the 26th, is no exception.
Prevenge (UK, dir. Alice Lowe)
Widowed Ruth (writer/director Alice Lowe) is seven months pregnant, and on top of the stresses of single motherhood she has a unique problem: her fetus demands that she kill people. Between visits to her concerned midwife (Jo Hartley), Ruth fills out her baby book with plans and details of her murders. As her due date draws near, can Ruth complete the baby’s diabolical plan before she gives birth? Prevenge would be an impressive directorial debut for anybody, but considering Lowe was actually seven months pregnant when she shot the film (in just 11 days!), it’s nothing short of incredible. She gives a fantastic lead performance, helping guide the film through some sharp tonal shifts between disarmingly honest poignancy and humor with tension and sudden violence. Prevenge sits comfortably next to Lowe’s turn in Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers as another excellent performance from an exciting talent in the genre.
Hounds of Love (Australia, dir. Ben Young)
John (Stephen Curry) and Evelyn (Emma Booth) live in a quiet Australian suburb in the late 1980s where they have made a habit of kidnapping and killing young women as part of their sexual routine. One evening they pick up Vicki (Ashleigh Cummings) just a few blocks away from her mother’s house as she sneaks out to a party. Over the next several days, Vicki observes the couple’s relationship and desperately tries to figure out how to use what she learns to escape while her estranged parents attempt to convince the police to do anything to help bring Vicki home. Hounds of Love covers some very dark and familiar territory, but it does so with an uncommon artistry. Writer/director Ben Young has crafted a technically impressive horror show, impeccably shot by cinematographer Michael McDermott. Curry is terrifying as John and Booth is scary and heartbreaking by turns, the couple leading a solid cast. This is some extremely dark territory, but its technical merits elevate Hounds of Love above its contemporari
es even if they don’t necessarily make it any easier to watch.
68 Kill (USA, dir. Trent Haaga)
Chip (Matthew Gray Gubler) lives in a trailer park with his girlfriend Liza (AnnaLynne McCord), but she wants more. One day while turning a trick at the home of a local creep, Liza learns he has $68,000 stashed in a safe and enlists Chip to help steal it. Although she reassures him no one will get hurt, by the end of the night there are multiple bodies and a young woman named Violet (Alisha Boe) in the trunk of Liza’s car. In very short order, Chip learns he has been living on the very edge of some very nasty goings-on, and before the night is out he’ll be deeper in the middle of it than he could have imagined. Trent Haaga’s previous directorial outing was the pitch-black comedy Chop, and some of his previous writing credits include Cheap Thrills, Deadgirl, and Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV. In other words, it’s not surprising that 68 Kill delights in gleeful misanthropy, playing out as an outlandishly cartoonish satire of film noir conventions: Chip is the hapless sucker roped into trouble by the lure of sex, but this kind of trouble is on a whole different level than what was waiting for Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity. This means that the film traffics in some all-too-familiar female stereotypes, although neither Chip nor any of the other men in the film come out looking any better and the cast—especially McCord as the ultimate “crazy girlfriend” and Sheila Vand as the menacing ringleader of a group of rednecks—all look like they’re having the time of their lives. It’s gruesome, offensive, and mean-spirited, but if you’re in the right frame of mind you might have a blast with 68 Kill.
Neighborhood Food Drive (USA, dir. Jerzy Rose)
Madeline (Lyra Hill) and Naomi (Bruce Bundy) started an upscale restaurant called Ciao in Chicago’s Humboldt Park, but they’re facing backlash for their part in gentrifying the neighborhood. They decide to throw a neighborhood food drive at Ciao to help their image and hire an intern, Bianca (Ruby McCollister), whose boyfriend Steven (Marcos Barnes) is a waiter at the restaurant. Bianca and Steven’s professor David (Ted Tremper) is providing them with unofficial and highly unusual couples counseling and joins them in helping plan the party. Will these five people be able to throw one successful food drive, or will their hubris destroy them all? Neighborhood Food Drive is one of the absolute funniest films of the year, amping up the barbed satire of Rose’s previous feature Crimes Against Humanity to a level of nightmarish absurdity. All of its central characters are terrifyingly self-centered and fundamentally misguided, but the cast plays them to perfection and the film is unpredictable in its brilliant left-field touches. Rose plays the supremely unimportant travails of these characters like a horror movie, with lurid Bavaesque lighting and an ominous synth score casting a pall of dread over the proceedings. Neighborhood Food Drive is hilariously bleak, inventive, and utterly unique.
She’s Allergic to Cats (USA, dir. Michael Reich)
Mike Pinkney (Mike Pinkney) moved to Hollywood to make movies, but instead he’s grooming dogs. In his off hours he makes lo-fi video art with an old camcorder, but what he really wants to do is an all-cat remake of Carrie. Mike’s life is an increasingly unmanageable mess, from the rats that infest his shoddy rented house to his producer Sebastian (Flula Borg) berating him for not coming up with ideas that have commercial potential. One day at work he meets Cora (Sonja Kinski) and asks her out, but when the big evening comes things go much differently than Mike hoped. Debut feature writer/director Michael Reich gives She’s Allergic to Cats the look and texture of one of its protagonist’s videos: everything has a sheen of hazy video noise and the movie frequently lapses into multi-layered montages of images and text. It’s an audacious choice and takes some getting used to, but it perfectly fits the material. It also gives what could be a fairly typical indie comedy about a struggling filmmaker a creepy, dreamlike atmosphere that is often completely at odds with what’s happening on-screen. That gives the film a distinct tone that Reich manages to maintain even as it veers from surreal comedy into more horrific territory. It’s a singular and intriguing debut feature, and it’ll be interesting to see where Reich goes from here.
Saint Bernard (USA/France, dir. Gabriel Bartalos)
A composer named Bernard (Jason Dugre) stumbles through a series of bizarre events after finding the severed head of a Saint Bernard, which he puts in a bag and carries around with him. Writer/director Gabe Bartalos has been working in makeup and special effects since the 1980s, making a name for himself with credits including From Beyond and Darkman. But it’s his work with Matthew Barney that Saint Bernard ultimately most resembles; the film’s structure is closer to Cremaster than Leprechaun. Bernard’s encounters range from an encounter with a monstrous chief of police at a Kafkaesque police station to an attack by anthropomorphic bundles of human hair. It’s all but impossible to summarize Saint Bernard, as any semblance of narrative is much less important than its constant barrage of bizarre surrealist imagery. What makes the film compelling, though, is its handmade feel. The production and set designs are dizzyingly intricate, and the practical effects are often astonishing. It would likely benefit from repeat viewings, and it was clearly a labor of love for Bartalos. It’s definitely not going to be for everybody, but anyone looking for top-shelf weirdo eye candy should put Saint Bernard on their watch list immediately.
A Life in Waves (USA, dir. Brett Whitcomb)
Even if you don’t know the name Suzanne Ciani, you’ve almost certainly heard her work. Ciani worked with synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla at the start of her career, and in the 70s and 80s she brought the synthesizer into the spotlight by scoring countless iconic advertising campaigns. A Life in Waves follows Ciani in the present day as she looks back on her amazing career and finds herself surprised by a new generation of enthusiastic fans. Director Brett Whitcomb’s previous feature documentaries include The Rock-A-Fire Explosion and GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, and A Life in Waves sits comfortably alongside them as a thoughtful portrait of a fascinating subject. Like Tyler Hubby’s Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present last year, much of the pleasure of watching this film comes from simply spending time with Ciani and listening to her thoughtful musings on life, her art, and her career. If it feels a little too short, it’s probably mostly because she’s so fun to hang out with and listen to.
Hidden Reserves (Austria/Germany, dir. Valentin Hitz)
Vincent Baumann (Clemens Schick) is a death insurance salesman. He lives in a future where rich and poor are rigidly segregated, and technology allows companies to mine people’s bodies for resources after they die by putting them into a permanent vegetative state while they “work off” their debts. Lisa (Lena Lauzemis) is the daughter of one of the pioneers of this technology, and she has dedicated her life to fighting the system with a group of activists who perform assisted suicides allowing people to die on their own terms. Baumann is enlisted by his employer to infiltrate the resistance, but will Lisa be able to turn him in time to execute a plan to bring down the whole system? Hidden Reserves is a cold but gorgeous sci-fi noir that recalls the dystopian futures of Minority Report and Brazil, and its distinctive look and tone are reminiscent of Alex Proyas’s Dark City. That’s not to say it’s overly derivative of those films, but rather that it fits in well in that lofty company. Some of the aspects of its world are a little underdeveloped, but its elaborate intrigues and impressive style make that feel like a minor complaint. This is probably going to end up being one of the best sci-fi films of the year; it’s hard to imagine there being many others that come close.
Dave Made a Maze (USA, dir. Bill Watterson)
Annie (Meera Rohit Kumbhani) returns from a business trip to find her frustrated artist boyfriend Dave (Nick Thune) has built a cardboard labyrinth in their living room. He claims to be lost and asks Annie to call his friend Gordon (Adam Busch) to help. Gordon invites a bunch of their mutual friends including documentary filmmaker Harry (James Urbaniak) and his crew, who are making a documentary on Dave’s maze. When they fi
nally enter the maze itself, instead of a couple of cardboard boxes stuck together they find an elaborate, sprawling space complete with booby traps and a Minotaur (John Hennigan). Dave Made a Maze is a surreal comedy/horror film with a great cast, but the real star here is the maze itself. All of the sets and effects are made out of countless pieces of cardboard and other stuff you might find laying around the house, including the “gore”—red yarn and silly string--when people are unlucky enough to end up in a trap. That kind of handmade aesthetic can often come off as simple whimsy, but here it’s so exaggerated it becomes unsettling. It’s still funny, and debut feature director Watterson gives the film an anarchic playfulness that makes it refreshingly unpredictable.
The Unrepentant Cinephile Page 109