DAY
5
THE
BLACK STRING
At the Q&A afterwards,
the filmmakers spoke of how sweet and humble Frankie Muniz was and how he really
pursued this role. And surely Muniz gives the performance of his career as
mild-mannered Jonathan, a hapless slacker just trying to get through the day.
But to stave off loneliness, he meets a woman on the internet, seems to
contract an STD and it’s all downhill from there. Hanson spoke of the
inspiration as being what if the homeless guy on the street ranting to himself
is telling the truth? Muniz’s sincerity, intelligence and wiry energy makes it all
consistently on edge as this seemingly meek guy gets more potentially
dangerous. Is Jonathan just paranoid and deluded, suffering from a mental
breakdown, or is he really the target of a Satanic conspiracy? The ambiguity is
wisely kept right to the very end to let the sadness and tragedy linger. Surely
a small cult favourite in the making.
Satanic
Panic
With an opening that evokes
‘Halloween’ and ‘Suspiria’, ‘Satanic Panic’ proceeds to
give a decent bright-and-breezy fun-ride into rich people’s Satanism. It’s the
kind of thing promised by the covers of teen horror paperbacks, and indeed it’s
written by Grady Hendrix, author of the wonderful ‘Paperbacks from Hell’.
It’s also backed by the genre bible ‘Fangoria’ and agreeably
female-centred. Sam (Hayley Griffith), the sweet but not stupid pizza
girl, amusingly gate-crashes a coven’s motivational speech looking for tips and
– as she’s a twenty-two year-old fuzzy-bunny virgin and eligible for
sacrificing – from then it’s a rush for survival through rich people’s yards
and houses. There’s an excellent regally camp performance by Rebbeca Romijn as head
witch, some coven politicking, some rudeness, a decent helping of gore and
one-liners (“A sweater that smells like racism.”). There’s also the theme of rejecting
your parents and adults and asserting yourself. As a piece of camp bubble-gum pop horror, it’s
highly entertaining without any feeling it should be exceptional.
TALES
FROM THE LODGE
Abigail
Blackmore, 2019, UK
Old friends reunite to
commemorate the death of their friend Jonesy at a remote lodge and launch into
horror stories at intervals. These mini-tales are minor diversions, not strong
enough to give an old ‘Amicus’ feel, although the corpse on the windshield
and the open rib-cage of Mackenzie Crook are vivid, the sex-ghost raises an
eyebrow and Vegas-‘Lost Boy’ mullet isn’t quite the comedy segment as
expected. These tales, occasionally directed by the cast members, that brings
the memorable imagery.
The main tale is held
up by a strong and playful cast, convincing as a bunch of very different but
fond friends from University with Martha Fraser as the unaccountably bitchy one
and Johnny Vegas puncturing any threat of pretension. But we don’t really get
to know why the storytelling is a thing for them, or why Jonesy was loved. Mostly
the comedy and drama is decently balanced before it goes-for-broke for a highly
convoluted twist that undoes much of the down-to-earth goodwill earned by the
cast to that point.
Jen & Sylvia
Soska, Canada, 2019
The Soska sisters are
FrightFest favourites and certainly their bubbliness and friendliness was all
over the festival weekend. They expressed enthusiastically their love of David
Cronenberg and their take on his ‘Rabid’ displayed much of the same
competence and weaknesses of their former FrightFest win, ‘American Mary’.
I saw one comment that we didn’t really need “Cronenberg’s ‘Zoolander’”,
which I don’t think is quite fair: there’s plenty of room for updating
body-horror in a fashion industry context – just as Refn used it for covens in ‘The
Neon Demon’ – but there’s a sense that the two themes of fashion and Rose’s
(Laura Vandervoort) surgery don’t truly end up saying much about one another.
Rose has a car accident
that leaves her hideously deformed, crashing her dreams of becoming a fashion
designer, but an experimental skin graft not only cures her face but also her fashion
sense. Afterwards, she no longer wears her hair back, big glasses and clothing
up to her neck, but is more prone to a more conventionally idea of beauty (hair
down, no glasses, more cleavage, etc). Cronenberg’s original may have been
scruffy and lo-fi but it was visceral and disturbing in its ideas: a zombie
virus transmitted as an STD through an armpit penis-syringe. Despite the
make-up, the Soska’s reimagining is a far safer affair by comparison by
excising the STD element and relegating things to a confusing CGI armpit
tendril, or making victims toxic males deserving of death. Although Mackenzie Gray
camping it up as Gunter is a delight.
More disconcerting for
me is that ‘Rabid’ threatens my criteria for internal logic, those details
that aren’t paid enough attention to or just make me question general plausibility.
For example, Rose is forever taking off her dressing as if that’s easy with minimum
of weeping from a huge gaping wound – surely it would never be taken off immediately
that way – especially when this very point is brought up later by a nurse with
another patient. And we never see it reapplied. Of course, this is done to get
to the gross make-up, but there’s no sense of suspense or realistic timing with
it. Or when she returns home and messily eats blended food through a straw:
wouldn’t she already be used to that; wouldn’t that be a scene best relegated
to the hospital? Or there’s just a corpse left in the alley and never mentioned
again? Or there’s the writing board that
magically clears itself between her scrawlings; or how, in the finale, they
walk into the room but don’t seem to see that behind them until it’s
wanted by the script. It’s this kind of lacunae that is generally dismissed
with “It’s just a movie” but it’s also a sign of a script’s strength or
weakness. It’s hard to concentrate on a serious film when it’s playing
fast-and-loose with detail and using genre as an excuse. All films have this
but when it’s a recurring feature it scuppers investment in the material. (For
instance, compare with ‘Why Don’t You Just Die!’ where detail is all or ‘Bullets
for Justice’ where it doesn’t matter and isn’t needed.)
Many others liked ‘Rabid’
more than me and, despite my complaints here, I have the sense that the Soska
sisters are onto something good but that they aren’t quite disciplined or
scrappy enough. Their worthy themes surely demand more fine-tuning? If
anything, comparison show that however clinical Cronenberg appeared to be, he
was very punk and his ideas inherently scary. The Soskas offer a fine, smoother
doodle but it’s not as threatening.
A GOOD
WOMAN IS
HARD TO FIND
Abner Pastoll,
uK, 2019
If Mike Leigh did
horror? Pastoll’s follow up to 2015’s highly recommended ‘Road Games’ goes
from the sun-drenched to the dull atmosphere of Northern Irish estates. Sarah
(Sarah Bolger) is a recently widowed mother trying to get by. It’s pretty clear
that wherever she goes, she’s up against knee-jerk assumptions and that there’s
no help or sympathy coming; even her mother criticises her life choices. So,
when petty criminal Tito (Andrew Simpson) gatecrashes her place and makes her
an accomplice in his drug-dealing by stashing them in her place, she has
nowhere to turn. Also, he’s taken from the estates’ ruthless underworld bigwig
so trouble just keeps mounting. Sarah is forced to become resourceful and
ruthless, all the time giving reassuring asides to her young children.
Firstly, Bolger is
exceptional, a force of nature, never once compromising her character’s
strength or vulnerability; never once do we think of Sarah’s reactions as
inauthentic. Simpson’s performance as Tito is also of note, as we can believe
he is as disarming as he is frightening. Edward Hogg as Leo Miller, however,
comes from the predictable stock of villains with a quirk (he’s a grammar Nazi,
so he’s a class above), whose humourlessness is unintentionally amusing because
the bad guys are stereotypes where the film elsewhere is effortlessly nuanced;
they are far more suited to some Krays knock-off. It arguably makes him scary
but surely not economically savvy when he seemingly tortures and kills people
for what they don’t know. The third act falls into standard vigilante vengeance
denouement, although there is still the sense that Sarah is being forced into
this role, just as everyone wants to see her a certain way. She does the required
thing of letting her hair down and becoming more conventionally attractive to
kick ass; this is ostensibly to disguise her appearance, but she keeps this
look afterwards too, just in case we have any doubt that she will no longer be
messed with.
Such an ending is crowd-pleasing
and set up nicely but also safe. A little more ambiguity would not have gone
amiss, but always Bolger as Sarah elevates the material. As Father Gore says, “We’re
meant to applaud that, somehow, she’s able to make it out of a desperately ugly
male world intact.” And add class to that too
because Ronan Blasey’s script is always aware of social status and the impossibility
of getting out. But who would begrudge Sarah from making it after all?
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