On Antichrist- spoilers

My auteur bunch is really failing me lately. First, there was the head-scratcher from the Coen Brothers and now Lars vonTrier generates this controversial and altogether hokey semblance of... a Bergman film?.... an avant garde horror film?... or is he just having another big laugh? I won't deny that there's a strange power to certain segments of "Antichrist" (namely the final sequence with a horde of faceless women climbing a mountain), but overall, von Trier's latest left me cold.

There are two ways one can read "Antichrist". Taken seriously, it reads something like this: Like some of the best work of David Lynch including "Mulholland Drive" and "Inland Empire", von Trier's "Antichrist" exists somewhere between reality and psychological breakdown. With the lines blurred, it allows the director to fade in and out of naturalism, surrealism and, in the case of the talking fox in "Antichrist", outright absurd ism. Re-watching the Lynch films mentioned, I certainly see a link between some of the hidden references in both films. If you pay close enough attention, you can almost tell where the fissures inside Naomi Watson's character breaks open into la-la-land. There's a distinct purpose in alot of the visual and aural madness. With "Antichrist", I don't know if repeat viewings will substantiate any thoughtful undercurrents. Honestly, I don't have the energy to try. If we relate the violent and unsettling events in "Antichrist" directly to the grief-stricken, fractured mind of the woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg), then von Trier can mix up a huge cocktail of irrelevant images, stifled emotions and confusing analogies in the hopes of labeling his film as a psychotic exploration of a deteriorating mind. In short, this gives a film the license to be pretentious, awkward or passionately non-linear. Art students have been doing that for years. But strangely, out of the two possibilities of reading this film, it works the best in this light. The whole film very well may exist only in the head of Gainsbourg, and that succinctly explains the talking fox and her overwhelming desire to squash her husband's penis then drill a concrete block through his leg. For the sake of world cinema, this type of silly symbolism plays like gangbusters.

Secondly, "Antichrist" could be just another litmus test for American audiences. As a huge von Trier admirer until the early 00's, he seemed to go off the deep end around 1999, after the smashing success of "Dancer In the Dark". Though some of his subsequent films have its ardent admirers, "The Idiots", "Dogville", "Manderlay" and "The Boss Of It All", require loads of patience. The synopsis of "The Idiots"- a film in which a group of people run rampant around a city, babbling incoherently and disrupting its way of life- seems to be the cinematic mantra of von Trier. With "Antichrist", he's upped the ante with name stars and some CGI effects, but he's still the proverbial bull in the china shop. I can easily see "Antichrist" being fired up in circles for years to come, playing as a comedy. Hell, there's already a t-shirt.

"Antichrist" is not the worst film of the year, or even close. It's one of those meh 2 star things that picks at you because it's from the creative hand of a director you once greatly admired. Yes, Dafoe and Gainsbourg act their hearts out with the conviction of really tormented people, and it features a stunning prologue and epilogue in shimmering black and white that immediately sets the tone for something great. And while the visual trademark of von Trier for the past decade has been the hand-held jerky thing, catching images on the fly and cutting after every sentence spoken by the actors, "Antichrist" is compellingly static for the most part. His camera has meaning in certain parts. One of the most striking shots in the entire film is the subtle moment as the camera virtually sits atop the casket of their dead son, peering out the back window as man and woman walk in grief behind it. Gainsbourg falls to the ground and the camera makes a wild little verge to catch her, then rests back atop the casket. In a film chock full of wanna-be-horrific images, this small moment has stuck with me the most. If everything in "Antichrist" had been handled with this emotional intellectualism, then maybe I'd be talking about the latest von Trier masterpiece.

The Nasty Remains: More Horror Film Capsules

Kwaidan

I really have no excuse why it’s taken so long to watch Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 precursor to the now prolific J-horror wave, “Kwaidan”. Less about outright scares and more concerned with the slow-burn atmosphere and mood that surrounds the age old ghosts stories that the compendium film tells, “Kwaidan” is also visually sumptuous. Told against the artificial backdrop of lively painted sets, the film features tales with ominous names such as “The Black Hair” and “The Woman of the Snow” that center on the scorn of betrayal within relationships. Each one of these four tales have roots in mythic storytelling and they’ve been done countless times over since, but watching the original source is still entertaining.


Dead Snow

Taking two of the most successful genre types of the recent years (the bad Nazi and the zombie picture) and merging them into a blood-splattered, playful exercise seems like a can’t miss formula. And for the most part, Tommy Wirkola’s Norwegian horror film “Dead Snow” succeeds. His penchant for self reflexive humor is obvious (and a bit much at times as the characters want us to know how hip they are by referencing “The Evil Dead” and quoting Indiana Jones), but this is certainly not a film for strong character development. The 7 med students who travel to a snowy mountaintop cabin and find themselves sitting on a box of dead Nazi gold are nothing more than ciphers for the bloodletting. The make-up is especially inventive and creepy. And as the final (insanely bloody) 30 minutes rolls, the parenthetical homage to Raimi and Peter Jackson are quickly matched. Fun stuff.


The Unseen

When one of the main stars of a film is the portly and weird Sidney Lassick, the bar isn’t set very high. So as it is with this 1980 film about three reporters who become trapped in the house of a deranged brother and sister… and with something evil lurking in the basement. There’s no subtext at all here. The idea of female empowerment ala “The Descent” or a trip into true madness are both avoided here. Instead, “The Unseen” is a pretty boring and harmless 80’s oddity.

Near Dark

With several high profile credits to her name- and a potential Oscar run on her hands with this year’s “The Hurt Locker”- 1987’s “Near Dark” remains, for my money, Kathryn Bigelow’s best film. Merging the western into a type of gothic horror (oh how pretty those sunlit Texas plains quickly turn into darkness as a Winnebago stalks across the landscape), Bigelow upped the ante on the modern vampire flick and created something very naturalistic and frightening. The sexual tension between Mae (Jenny Wright… what happened to her??) and Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) sets the framework for a tragic love story filled with blood, gore and broken mythology. I watch this every year and damn if it doesn’t get better and better.


Pontypool

A cerebral zombie picture of the highest order, Bruce McDonald’s “Pontypool” is an effective one set character piece that dazzles and elates with words and ideas rather than gore. The picture I chose as the screen cap below is grossly overselling the bloodletting. As a Don Imus like radio DJ, Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) stumbles into work one day and is plunged directly into an apocalyptic catastrophe as it builds in the outside world. Trapped inside the small Canadian radio station with Mazzy is his producer Sydney (Lisa Houle) and assistant Julia Ann (Georgina Reilly). Broken cell phone calls, unintelligible babbling from callers and off-frame noises slowly integrate the evolving madness upon the isolated radio station. “Pontypool” is a revelatory zombie picture, although writer Tony Burgess and McDonald are careful to avoid the use of the word zombie at all. The virus spreads through the use of the English language, which in and of itself poises just as many questions as the film answers. It’s all heady stuff, to be sure, but immensely pleasurable and challenging.


Dinner With A Vampire

The first 45 minutes of Lamberto Bava’s “Dinner With A Vampire” eschews the cheesy Italian horror genre by playing with the ideas of showmanship and successfully copying the black and white eeriness of Murnau’s “Nosferatu”. The second half becomes, well, a cheesy Italian horror film complete with bad dubbing, confusing scene changes and continuity errors (a female wearing stockings one scene, bare legs the next, then back to stockings!).

Links

1. Check out these twisted photo art things for a taste of Halloween. If they don't creep you out a little, then you're surely a stronger person than I.

2. Lots of solid 80's goodness going on at This Distracted Globe.

3. Don't forget to find Coast To Coast on your radio dial this weekend. Their Ghost To Ghost special is always good for some weird, scary and entertaining listener phone calls.

4. And finally, if you're not watching, I can't urge sports fans enough to tune into ESPN's 30 For 30 documentaries every Tuesday night. A partial TV schedule is here. First class filmmakers (Barry Levinson, Peter Berg, Albert Maysles and others) tackle some obscure and soulful subjects. Levinson's portrait of the Baltimore Colts Marching Band and Maysles' never-before-seen footage of the Larry Holmes/Muhammad Ali fight in 1980 are better than 90% of the films I've seen this year.

Witching Hour: Horror Film Capsules

House of the Devil

Ti West’s “House of the Devil” is a definite step up from his previous genre riffs, “The Roost” and “Triggerman”. Shrouded in a great 80’s funk (with the tone set immediately by the big yellow block credits and a Cars-like knock off tune), it tells the story of a broke college student (Jocelin Donahue) who takes on more than she can handle when she accepts a baby sitting gig at a cavernous house in the country. Populated with distinctive and eerie faces such as Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov as the house’s owners, the film builds slowly. The first 2/3 is all atmosphere, mood and formalism as West sets up the exploration of the house with carefully framed static shots and slow, portentous zooms. Then the last part accelerates into a frenetic, freaky ride with some terrific shock cuts. It’s ideas are a bit derivative, but “House of the Devil” remains a strong genre effort that deserves a large midnight audience.



Demons 3: The Ogre

So apparently I’m one of the many who fell for this misrepresented movie. Made for Italian TV by “Demons” director Lamberto Bava, money-grubbing producers only added the “Demons 3” part to suck in any fans of that great series of horror flicks. Instead, we get a guy in a rubber suit dressed up as an ogre (and who seems to originate from a colorful plasma pouch hanging from the ceiling of a castle basement) scaring the daylights out of a woman and her family. There is some good atmosphere, but overall the film plods along with very few scares and even less gore. The enjoyable parts? The way the film changes from night to day with little sense of time (like all good Italian horror films do!) and the orgasmic screams of its female lead whenever she’s in trouble. That’s about all I can say for this one.

Trick R Treat

Michael Doughtery’s gestating-long-on-the-shelf anthology horror film is wild, energetic, gory and completely engrossing. Taking place over one Halloween night in small town Ohio, “Trick R Treat” has a deceptively simple throwback feel to it as it weaves together such disparate characters as a serial killer, ghost children, cranky old men, vampires and a demonic little thing with a pumpkin bag over its head. It does delve into its fair share of nastiness, but overall, “Trick R Treat” smartly juggles its zig-zagging story lines with humor and surprising outcomes. If nothing else, one can tell that Doughtery loves and respects horror movies.



Burnt Offerings

Another take on the demonic house genre, “Burnt Offerings” deserves little mention in this genre other than that. I suppose part of the fun in watching horror movies this time of year is discovering the great ones, and suffering through many of the bad ones. Oliver Reed and Karen Black play the couple who rent an old, spacious house for the summer and struggle as the house slowly invades their dreams and behavior. The house makes Black dress up in 1860’s style clothing and drives Reed to continually work on the lawn and pool, apparently. Filmed and released in the late 70’s, it definitely serves as a relic of its time…. soft lenses and all. At times, I thought I was watching one of those 70’s Emmanuela films. Skip this one.



The Hidden

Ok… more of a sci-fi film than an outright horror, but Jack Sholder’s 80’s cult item is still an entertaining ride. Fresh off his stint on “Blue Velvet”, Kyle McLaughlin remains in catatonic weird mode as an FBI agent joining forces with an LAPD office (Michael Nouri) to track a parasite that takes over ordinary people’s bodies and turns them into heavy metal listening, fast car driving killers. A dash of Cronenberg here and William Friedkin there, “The Hidden” is probably best viewed after a couple of drinks. Worth it just to watch how the parasite travels from human being to human being, though.

Grace

The psychological plight of new mothers has been a prevalant- and particularly nasty-theme for several years now and Paul Solet's "Grace" adds a new dimension to the genre. It would make a nice double bill with Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo's splatterfest masterpiece "Inside". As the mother to new baby Grace, Jordan Ladd locks herself away in her house and discovers her daughter isn't quite right. We discern that pretty quickly when the baby is pronounced dead in the womb after the effects of a violent car accident, but is born alive. Solet doles out information slowly, keeping the bloody actions just below the camera lens which serves to heighten the questions we develop about the mother. Is she imagining it all? How does the 'new age' aspect tie into the story? Solet does answer the questions and even leaves the possibility open to a sequel.

On "A Serious Man"

It's hard to formulate thoughts about the Coen Brothers' latest film, "A Serious Man". Visually, their flare for precise framing and point of view is firmly intact. Carter Burwell score is quiet yet haunting. The sound design (especially a scene on the roof of a house and the almost cosmic way Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" floats in and out on the soundtrack) is tremendous. The laughs don't come as loudly as in "Burn After Reading", but their sardonic wit opens up a ton of small, amusing moments mostly in body posture and slow reaction shots. Still, there's something very hard to crack about "A Serious Man". Perhaps it's the almost oppressive air of 'Jewishness' about the film. I know very, very little about this style of religion, so the film's opening- some type of Jewish parable about a dybbuk visiting a couple in what I'm guessing to be Biblical times- immediately threw me for a loop. I'm still not completely sure how this ties in with the rest of the film. Other parts of "A Serious Man" are just as head-scratching, partly due to my own knowledge-incompetence and partly due to Joel and Ethan Coen's playfully oblique way of doling out information. I should, after all, be used to the Coen Brothers and their startling methods of presenting comedy and drama by now, but this is a film that probably deserves multiple viewings. Still, their track record for sucking the air out of the theater with a supremely anti-climacic finale has found its way into their third successive feature and will surely crank out just as much discussion as "No Country For Old Men".

Random Halloween Suggestion #4

A bit cliche, yes, but a helluva lotta fun in a sold out screening. Oren Peli's "Paranormal Activity" gave me quite a few goosebumps through its ingenious design and smart timing for scares. It's all pretty basic (stationary camera set up in the corner of the room) but it elicits some uncommon emotions (forcing your eyes to search the edges of the darkness, trying to anticipate where the movement or sound will emanate from). This is the type of thing Kiyoshi Kurosawa does best. While I'm not saying it's in the same league as Kurosawa's mind-bending efforts, "Paranormal Activity" does push some of the right buttons of mood and atmosphere.


Even if one doesn't completely buy the repertoire between its non actor couple (Katie Featherstone and Micah Sloat), "Paranormal Activity" is more about having fun than building up strong character development. I couldn't help but laugh, though, when during the screening I saw, someone shouted out "time to go, niggas!" after the third or fourth night of strange occurrences. An apt description indeed. See this one with friends and have a good time on Halloween.

The Kids Aren't Alright: Afterschool and Home Movie

Taking a break from the ghosts and haunted houses this Halloween season, I went in an entirely different direction and, seemingly, ended up with results just as terrifying. The homicidal, demonic impulses of children. Given the fear factor and creepiness of so many bad children movies lately, I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised. "Afterschool", the debut feature of NYU student Antonio Campos and "Home Movie" by Christopher Denham, share a common theme of modern technology documenting and informing the awkward self-growth of confused, screwed-up kids. And while neither film is a complete success in my opinion, they are exciting examples of independent film making pushing the envelope of technique and visual aggressiveness.


In the case of "Home Movie", director Denham opts for the messy aesthetic of a home video camera to document the slow-burn evolution of two siblings Jack and Emily (Austin Williams and Amber Joy Williams) from passive aggressive trouble makers to young serial killers-in-training. Mostly shot by Lutheran preacher/father David (Adrian Pasdan), we soon begin to wonder when anyone will notice the dangerous underpinnings of these twins... such as how they quietly appear without notice carrying blank stares or their grotesque fascination with the torture and dismemberment of the family pets. But as any faux-video camera movie lover knows, we have to work our way up to the sadistic shots, which "Home Movie" eventually conjures up in the final disturbing few minutes. To make matters even more ironic, the household matriarch (Cady McLain) is a child psychologist who tries to self medicate her children into bliss. While "Home Movie" does feature some creepy moments (whose shock edit is to visually collapse the first-person video shot with colored static and jump right into the next happy family moment) the fault of the very short film is its underwhelmed parent character development. How long will they continue shooting the macabre events after they figure out their children would put The Omen kid to shame? Enough for another 30 minutes of film, obviously. "Home Movie" is a nice experiment, but I wonder if a more traditional approach (i.e. careful camera compositions and less enthusiastic, unnatural parent reactions) would have gleaned just as many scary truths.

Likewise interested in the slow bridge from awkward adolescence to something a bit more demonic is Antonio Campos' "Afterschool". The better of the two films, Campos does choose calculated camera positions and a shrewd sense of editing to jolt the viewer out of our hazy submission when the violence does occur. Robert (Ezra Miller) finds life at an upstate New York prep school unfair. With few friends and a drug dealing roommate, he recedes into the world of online violence (You-Tube like clips of girls fighting) and amateur porn. While filming a documentary for his AV class, he records an empty hallway when two popular and pretty twin sisters emerge from the school bathroom in mid overdose. He runs over and sits with one of them as she dies. What follows is a scathing, absurdly funny and highly caustic examination of Robert's life as he deals with the trauma and tries to engage his emotions through the static window of the world he's absorbed online. And it features a final shot that re-imagines the entire film in scary and horrible ways.

Campos films "Afterschool" with a stationary camera that observes most of the action head-on with a blurred depth of field. People and images are often blurred until they walk up close to the camera and begin their conversations. It's as if we're watching this environment through the widescreen window of an observation room. And it fits the clinical approach Campos seems to harbor for his characters. Robert does find love (and sex) in muted, off-center moments with girlfriend Amy (Addison Timlin) but "Afterschool" eschews any coming-of-age gestures. This is nasty and sociopathic stuff.

It's impossible to deny the influence of Michael Haneke on Campos and his effort. The way video images are toyed with, "Afterschool" continually challenges the viewer to discern what's a recorded sequence and what's actually happening in narrative order. The opening shot of Haneke's masterpiece, "Cache" for example, has been his provocative style since day one. While Campos isn't quite in this territory yet, "Afterschool" does prove he has a knack for manipulating point of view into a twisted ideal. Campos even includes a wink to the audience in the final scene after we're exposed to the real nature and obstructed action done by Robert in that hallway observing the two girls die. But for me, the real triumph of "Afterschool" is young Robert's cut of the "memorial" video for the girls, quickly shuttled away by the uptight head master (Michael Stuhlbarg) after seeing the twisted images he put on-screen. I couldn't imagine a more fitting visual representation inside the head of a troubled kid than that, home video camera or otherwise.