Here is a new video for an old song. "50s garden Rocket" was the first Buck Theorem song, made when I was in the band I Am The Twister. That's my Twister pal Paul West providing some drums and xylophone. It was made on an old 4-track in the early- or mid-Nineties and spruced up digitally decades later. It features on my first effort, "Waiting Firecrackers".
I promise to pick up everyone.
Black Test Car
黒の試走車 – Kuro no tesuto kâ
Director: Yasuzô Masumura
Writers: Kazuo Funahashi, Yoshihiro Ishimatsu
Novel: Sueyuki Kajiyama
1962, Japan
‘Black Test Car’ looks like Sixties New Wave shaded by Film Noir, and it certainly uses this look and urgency to dress up its tale of industrial espionage as a spy thriller. Two companies engage in dirty tricks – blackmail, bribery, bullying, pimping, spying, etc – to beat the other to the punch in developing a sports car. But of course, it’s much deeper than that. The fanatical company loyalty is akin to blind patriotism, and indeed there are CEOs with military backgrounds and the whole rivalry is played out like a warzone where ethics are seen as naïveté. And of course, this is conflated with capitalism. Jonathan Rosenbaum speaks of how Masumura portrayed this as a madness.*
JapanonFilm equates Asahino’s closing moral speechifying as typical of this genre of drama, condemning their tactics as concomitant with gangsterism, but also in a specifically Japanese context.
“But he adds the unexpected twist of comparing the company to the Army and telling his boss he might as well “put on khaki.” Masumura and his screenwriters are not necessarily representative of the society as a whole, but the very idea that the previously god-like Army could now be considered worse than the yakuza in a mainstream entertainment movie indicates just how far a large segment of public opinion has swung by 1960.”
Aside from this insanity of unquestioning devotion, the correlation between sex, work and money is brazen. Masoko (Junko Kano) sensuously kissing a jewelled ring after she’s been pimped out by her boyfriend to obtain industrial secrets is typical. Inevitably, when business is so dominated by men, toxic masculinity is rife; but as Rosenbaum notes, everyone here is villainous. It’s not quite like ‘The Sweet Smell of Success’ where the women are superior, ethically speaking, but ‘Black Test Car’ is even more obvious that the women know that their gender compromises their opportunity and choices. The men have no such mitigating motivation: their company loyalty is corrosive.
It’s not so subtle and doesn’t need to be, with characters often talking in exposition (or at least the subtitles do: “Here is your spying money,” is a highlight). The settings are boardrooms and clubs and bedrooms, but the sequences are often rapid, the pace persistent, the plotting and double-crossing keeps coming, so it’s always compelling. The black-and-white compositions and suits give this an element of surface cool even as the centre gets increasing warped and destructive.
The word “black” became synonymous with corruption in Japanese culture, with Deiei’s Tokyo studio releasing a whole series of films under this rubric. Made during a booming period in Japanese cinema, these films reflect post-war social changes and anxieties about such economic booms – such as the car industry – and wrestled with ethical struggles with new and old systems. Masumura’s follow-up to ‘Black Test Car’ was ‘The Black Report’ (aka. ‘Black statement Book’), a similarly thorough and cynical text on the legal system.
The Black Report
Aka. Black Statement Book
Kuro no hôkokusho
Director: Yasuzô Masumura
Writers: Yoshihiro Ishimatsu, Yasuzô Masumura
‘The Black Report’ starts with the beautifully composed aftermath of a murder, the scene decorated with flowers. The mixture of death and decoration is almost giallo-like. Both ‘Test Car’ and ‘Report’ begin with their most striking images – the car covered in a tarpaulin to disguise its design and the murder scene – that imprint themselves in the memory from the outset as the film goes into more offices and meetings to tell its tale. ‘The Black Report’ is less jazzy than its predecessor, but courtroom dramas have a built-in suspense mechanism.
Again, as things unfold, Masumara’s style is rapid with barely a diversion or segue. Just clean cuts, parcels of information developing the narrative with each scene. There’s so many details – this affair, another affair… no… Yes?... that another film might take half hour dispensing where Masumura takes ten minutes. And then, the trial falls apart as the angle of each testimony changes. One side has the ideal of law and the other sees it as sport.
Both these films end with triumph and defeat as equal, as much losing when winning, creating a picture where truth and fairness are impossible within a crowd of personalities and perspectives, weaknesses, plots and corruption. Comeuppance is waved tantalisingly at the audience before the deadline is missed and the idealist becomes the scapegoat.
And yet although fatalism and sleaze caps the narratives, so does acceptance and both films finish with the idealist going on to do presumably future good works, presumably wiser from their experience. Despite the beautiful high contract black-on-white on display, this is definitely a frustrated world of grey. That element of “unfairness” that I always find so memorable in a film does not register here: one of the notable achievements of these films are that they refuse to fall on either side of nihilism or wish-fulfilment. They resound with something far more complex.
• * ‘Black Test Car’, Arrow release: ‘What Matsumara Does With Our Madness’: John Rosenbaum.
Keeping Company
Director - Josh Wallace
Screenwriters - Josh Wallace, Devin Das
Starting off on the more goofy end of horror, with humour quite broad, but hammering its satire harder and harder until we get bloodstains on white business phones. Trying to have the same bite as, say, ‘I Care a Lot’: it even has that "I'm a shark" bullshit. In this world, parents are monsters, meat is fast food capitalism, life insurance is just a scam, workers become unwitting murderers. It just doesn’t have that virtuoso streak of ‘Society’s finale or a footing in reality that might make the characters more engaging; or the gleeful silliness of ‘TerrorVision’; or, if we’re talking cannibalism and What Lies Behind Suburban Surfaces, the drollness of ‘Parents’. It becomes wearisome, even if it has a good pace.
Paradise Cove
Director - Martin Guigui
Screenwriter - Sherry Klein
2021, USA
I liked Martin Guigui’s ‘The Unhealer’, but although it starts with a clean and fresh air, ‘Paradise Cove’ just sticks to the clichés until there’s nothing to it. A couple buy a beachfront house to renovate, only to discover there’s a dotty homeless woman under it that just won’t leave. Any hope that it might take a surprising turn from all the other Eighties thrillers that are just like this and keep on coming are quickly disabused as soon as the knife goes in. A pleasing coastal setting make it nice to look at, but that’s no surprise and can’t stop plot holes and the central problem that, if they know she comes and goes and overhears them as she does, why not just leave? They don’t even discuss it. For all its gesturing at social conscience, it just becomes another tale of the privileged finding out that all their prejudices against the homeless aren’t unwarranted.
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Michiel Blanchart’s ‘You’re Dead, Hélène’ is tale of being haunted by a dead girlfriend that just won’t quit when you’re trying to move on. It’s funny, but deftly handles shifts in tone to horror and romantic sentiment.
Adam Harvey’s ‘Minimally Invasive’ has that one-location horror scenario that short films do so well. A nervous patient undergoing a routine operation … well, that’s all you probably need to know. The helplessness and squeamishness are all present and correct. It’s blackly comic fun.
endnote...
And I don’t know what happened because I thought I had bought the whole Grimmfest pass, but I hadn’t and therefore missed what I have seen called the best of the festival ‘Rendez-vous’, as well as ‘Sleepless Beauty’. More than that, I didn’t know that there was also free shorts until midway through the festival and thought I had time to watch… but I misjudged and then they were gone. So I missed a whole chunk. Silly me.
TRANS
Director-writer: Naeri Do
2020, The Republic of Korea
Time-loops, electricity and biology, bullying, temporal displacement, murder and nihilism. In a world of high school bullying, Minyoung Go (Hwanf JeJeong-in) is experiencing a time-loop. There’s a guy that sits in the desk in front of her that has an artificial – bionic? – arm. Someone has been murdered outside the school, fried to a crisp. Another guy, Taeyong (Kim Taeyoung) having saved her from bullying, shows her that he has a lab in back home and introduces her to transhumanism. He weds this to adolescent nihilism, thinking himself superior and humankind trash and over. This is not ‘Weird Science’. He even has a giant Tesla Coil thing set up in the desert. The narrative crashes along and doubles back on itself, leaving behind quickly what might appear to be a Making Superheroes At School revenge set-up. There’s still the dramatics of characters conflicting, but then there’s identity merging, and then we get to time travel… It’s heady, and you’d best keep up, and elements of fun come with playing electric guitar to Tesla Coils. Although there’s a Hard Sci-Fi feel to the philosophy, characters are just left confused and desperate in the wake of superpowers and multi-dimensions, which seems appropriate for bullied teenagers biting off more than they can chew. And where else can you go with angsty teens other than being swamped with Big Science they think they understand?
Red River Road
Writer/director - Paul Schuyler
2021, USA
A real family affair, made wholly by the Schuylers under lockdown conditions. This brings, of course, an authentic family feel to the characters and the setting – oh look, nerd stuff! A whole room dedicated to DVDs… and film reels as decoration! Action figures! – which helps no end with identification and investment. This wave of made-at-home films, long and short, are showcasing the innovation and DIY drive of filmmakers more than ever. Of course, it helps if you have the decent script and ideas. A short like ‘Thrall’ uses it limitations and assets and flourishes with themes, for example: at first, I probably thought it was standard fare, but upon reflection found it properly meaty. ‘Red River Road’ (the Schuylers’ actual road) deploys its scenario discreetly: Anna’s (Jade Schuyler) paranoid pillow talk early on may initially seem the result of a anxious nature, but it proves to be a vital junket to what’s going on; and once there’s the knife accident, things come into focus even more. With a solid family foundation, the film can take its time to drip-feed details that there’s a pandemic out there, spread by the internet that messes with reality. There’s even microchips in necks and rotary phone calls to imply government control. It’s right of its moment.
‘Red
River Road’ succeeds with
its depiction of a warm family dynamic and its portrayal of slipping reality,
lack of control, fear of the intangible and mounting loss. It would be harder
to find a more personal film capturing the anxieties and abstract doom of the
pandemic lockdown era. It even uses family film footage for the flashback/whatever.
A budget may even have been a hindrance to the vision.
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James McAbee’s ‘Nova’ is just what the short form is for: a rotating shot showing off special effects. Impressively executed and designed, we can fill in the backstory ourselves.
Sarah Bonrepaux’s ‘Strayed’ condenses abstract fear of the self, of being debilitated when you’re in your prime.
The
Sposato’s ‘Hey, it’s Me’ meets the criteria of its lofty sci-fi time-spanning
demands by focusing on one person, offering some retro-futurism and keeping it
things colourful. The Grimmfest summary cite ‘The Twilight Zone’, and it
certainly has that feel. Fully satisfying.
THE OTHER SIDE
“Andra Sidan”
Directors & writers: Tord Danielsson,
Oskar Mellander
2020, Sweden
A
Swedish version of the standard mainstream horror tropes, set in a country
where people don’t have strong indoor lights, or if they do they don’t turn
them on. But this does mean some nice shadow-play and lighting in an otherwise
non-Gothicky setting (the bar of light coming from an open bedroom door across
the hallway is imprinted on my memory). It’s about how a woman must prove her
worth as a stepmother to a child by facing off the bogeyman creeping in from
next door. Luckily, a few declarations of love seem to do the trick. Perhaps
this could have been a little more subtextual for effect. And it tends towards
that thing of setting up something up for just one scare and abandoning it: in
this case, surely she would/could have used the baby-cam for greater results? But
there is a wonderful performance from the five year-old Eddie Errikson
Dominguez (the directors’ experience in children’s TV paid off here) and it does a
good job of converting a modern and clean house into a scare-space, and although
quiet-quiet-BANG! doesn’t usually work for me, I did jump a couple of
times.
MARA
Writer & director: Alexey Kazakov
2020, Russian Federation
Trying to blag and gaslight his way out of a traumatic incident that has broken up his marriage, architect Andrey (Semyon Serzin) seeks the help of Mara (Aleksandra Revenko): she gives him a mushroom that makes his wife, musician Olya (Marina Vasileva), forget that incident. For payment, Mara asks Andrey to housesit her amazing New Agey apartment. Of course the mushroom works and of course nothing is as it seems.
An intriguing updating of making a pact with a witch that gradually becomes more
psychedelic as it goes on, incorporating body horror, fairy tale nods, war
flashbacks, Giallo palette, and the Kremlin. Andrey’s selfishness and weakness grounds
it all – he’s not malevolent, but acts unforgivably through not accepting what
has happened. With bravery and cowardice as key horror and fairy tale themes, ‘Mara’
makes the horror of the self and it’s failings central, as well as guilt
and culpability (he’s spent all this time thinking of what he should have done,
but when he’s given the chance it pleasingly doesn’t have the desired result,
adding even further layers). It’s a fairly heady mix. David Dent sees this as misogynistic, and of course there is the manipulative female
witch, and it’s true that Olya is more idealised than fully fleshed out,
constantly manipulated, but the film doesn’t condone that: but it struck me
that it was more about the failure of Andrey as a partner and punishing him for
facing up to reality. And that’s where the fairy-tale-horror stuff comes in,
and for that, as a horror based around mushrooms, it’s offers something a
little different.
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Stephen Parker’s ‘She Cries at Night’ provides simple creepy scares – you can’t go wrong with creepy crying and squeaky doors opening by themselves – when a couple try to recover from the loss of their child. As always, the supernatural preys on grief and offers them something crying at night… There’s a nice offhand chemistry between the two leads, some mild scares and a sense of what always sticks with me in horror: unfairness.
Minsun
Park and Teddy Tenenbaum’s ‘Southkorea Ghost Story’ tends towards
the more goofy end of horror, at least initially when Lyrica Okano visits
Magaret Cho and finds herself victimised by cultural rituals and mad motherdom.
There’s some dry playing and some memorable use of acupuncture for this
satirical take on cultural belief systems.
FINAL DAYS
aka: ALONE
Director – Johnny Martin
Writer – Matt Naylor
2020, USA
Johnny Martin’s remake of Il Chos’ ‘#Alive/#Saraitda’. But with Americanisation, most of the quirky and goofy angles have been smoothed off and the zombie apocalypse is just an excuse for our isolated protagonist to Meet Cute with the woman across the way. With no competition to speak of, things are a sure bet for him. He’s seemingly a bit narcissistic as well, so there’s the added bonus that the end of civilisation allows for a bit of self-improvement too (from coward to action hero being dominant). There’s a bit of clunkiness to the South Korean protagonist in the original (I’m a Ah-in Yoo fan) that adds a little individuality to an otherwise fairly average scenario, but in ‘Final Days’, when Tyler Posey is losing it (but he will still talk to himself so the audience knows his plans), he just looks designer handsome haggard; and Summer Spiro hardly looks troubled by all the death and destruction at all. There’s very little zombie nastiness because it’s not about that, although the characters do try to go all ‘Oldboy’. corridor scene at one point. ‘The Night Eats the World’ is a far bolder articulation of this premise. Things are given class with a cameo by Donald Sutherland, but it’s all a bit average.
SWEET RIVER
Director - Justin McMillan
Screenwriter – Eddie Baroo, Marc Furmie
2020, Australia
Ghosts have always been explorations of unending grief and guilt and barely repressed Secrets Of The Past In The Present, both personal and social, and they’re all that here. It’s pleasant to see the trope of spooky children’s laughter being met here with the gruff no-nonsense Aussie “Oy?!” And that’s emblematic of some friction between the engrossing and naturalist social milieu on display and the fact that ghosts are rendered in far more tropey fashion. However, Lisa Kay puts in the mileage as a woman returning to the town where her young son was murdered to search for the body, grief making her belligerent, and the evocation of a town devasted by tragedy is rich and compelling. As soon as someone says that “this has to come to a stop”, you know you’re in the realm of town secrets, and the town’s story and performances are strong enough to lift this above it’s more obvious elements.
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Kate Hamish’s ‘The Fox’ starts off with bedtime stories and promises of ghostly or monster doings, but it isn’t quite that. Rather, Hamish uses tropes to hide and then expose the shattering of a family. It’s most distinctive in its setting South East Asian horror with Australian context. Nicely filmed, it pleasingly swerves this way and that to its revelations.
Pavlov Sifakis’ ‘Ecdysis’ is nothing if not ambitious: as the Grimmfest synopsis says of this zombie short, “Profiteering from a pandemic, using it to trample over human rights and freedoms, and sacrificing public wellbeing to keep the wheels of capitalism rolling ever more efficiently... Who could ever imagine a government doing anything like that? It's like something out of a horror movie...” Certainly, real-world comparisons and context give it a kick, but such scope doesn’t quite fit comfortably in its short runtime.
THRESHOLD
Directors - Powell Robinson, Patrick R. Young
Screenwriter - Patrick R. Young
2020, USA
Leo (Joey Millen) is called for help by his junkie estranged sister Virginia (Madison West) and when he arrives, she seems be going cold turkey or having a drug-induced fit. But she says she says she’s no long an addict: rather, she is cursed, and she’s bound to some other guy and can feel what he feels. And so the siblings embark upon a road trip to find the man she has a symbiotic link to.
It
becomes pretty obvious early that this will be a film about their relationship,
filmed guerrilla style and improvisationally. And to this, Millen and West
acquit themselves admirably. But this isn’t ‘Before Sunrise’ for the
Satanists subgenre. As the road movie goes on, it becomes obvious that the
supernatural element that hooks isn’t given focus. Indeed, per the Grimmfest
Q&A, the finale was apparently made up the night before, and the directors
kind of feel the ending is just a tag-on to the improv road movie chamber
piece. Promising relationship study that doesn’t possess enough meat on its
bones, and that doesn’t realise that the strong premise ought to focus and
reveal much more about its characters.
CLAPBOARD
JUNGLE
Director
& screenwriter - Justin McConnell
2020,
Canada
Xanthe Pajarillo’s short film ‘Thrall’ is suely typifies the sort of film that is being made under lockdown, utilising the claustrophobia of the times and equating that with inescapable domestic issues. A young woman tries to maintain her personal life via the modern technology of her phone whilst looking after her mother. The fear and stifling nature of dementia-possession and of it being transmissible is all there. Found-footage has surely moved into Home Footage, which has its own problems (she allows two security camera’s in her bedroom? Does she know?), although we can perhaps dismiss the query of Who’s Watching. But ‘Thrall’ has the advantage of the short form to cut to the nub and has all the themes fully present – even touching on social care – that makes it full-blooded rather than just a horror snapshot.
A horror snapshot is what’s given with Ashlea Wessel’s ‘Weirdo’. We join a boy as he is presumably waiting for the bullies to leave before he starts home but school. But a bully catches him up and, as the Grimmfest summary says, “When an odd boy is confronted by a bully, conflict leads to a grim conclusion.” A washed-out palette and generally downbeat feel draws on all the High School misery films we’ve seen, and we can fill in the backstory and what this snapshot implies for the future easily. It only needs to chill.
Eric
Burleson's ‘The Bef’ is a piece that is even tricker with playing
with audience sympathies: a boy is pushing a toddler around, and even changes
it’s nappy. But it seems he’s being pursued… Again, using the short form to deny
the audience any comfortable, easy resolution, leaving a troubling stirring of
themes of abuse, complicity and the taboo breaking that horror specialises in.
THE NIGHT
Director: Kourosh Ahari
Writers: Kourosh Ahari, Milad Jarmooz
2020, USA-Iran
‘The Night’ opens with an excellent set-up with a party of friends, effortlessly conveying relationships that are obviously long-term and no inclined to punctuation for the audience; these are people who have known each other a while, are perfectly aware of one other’s foibles. And this continues when the focus narrows to the couple Babek (Shahab Hosseini) and Neda (Nioushi Noor), and Iranian couple living in the USA. Their marriage feels lived-in, no room for niceties, the underlying love taken as a given, the selfish traits and admonishments casual rather than argumentative. He, a little boorish; she a little needling. In this way they feel real. And of course, they have secrets, albeit ones that are well telegraphed.
So when they decide to stay in a hotel to resolve a marital disagreement, they are prime material for supernatural forces to exploit their human weakness. A hotel at night is always going to be evocative: pretty but impersonal. There’s a lot to enjoy in the slow-burn and perhaps ‘The Night’ is less riveting and more conventional when the situation is revealed, but the mundane fall-out of secrets and trauma are more convincing here for being organic as opposed to high dramatics. And there is enough creeping dread and surrealistic touches to keep this intriguing.
[Spoiler alert:] However, the final note that you can never escape purgatory unless you face yourself is elegantly rendered and speaks of horror of a deeper, personal nature: one where you can’t escape your self-denial.
La Vamipra da Barcelona
Director: Lluís Danés
Writers: Lluís Arcarazo, María Jaén
2020, Spain
IMDB says “In early 20th century Barcelona, little Teresa goes missing shocking the country. When police start investigating Enriqueta Martí, the "Vampiress of Raval", they cover a much more sinister affair.” But that isn’t quite the plot. This is the story of a troubled but apparently gifted journalist Sebastià Comas (Roger Casamajor) mired in the case of Enriqueta Martí, motivated by personal guilt at the death of his sister. But, like Alan Moore’s ‘From Hell’, and films such as ‘The Limestone Golem’ or Lang's ‘M’, Arcarazo and Jaén’s script is more interested in cultural context, commentary and corruption. Comas’ journalism is soon mutilated to fit an agenda and he crumbles even as he tries to cling to a truth he is told no one wants. The people want the “morbid”.
With strong themes and despair established, Danés goes out to play with aesthetic: black-and-white and vintage cinema quirks launching into colour for the nightmarish, or red dresses; there are real sets and cut-out sets. Sometimes sets drop into Derek Jarman minimalism even as the affectations of Guy Madden comes to mind. But this is not to compensate for a lack of script and plot, which is always intriguing even if Comas’ doesn’t see the depth of corruption that the audience has long guessed. In fact, on first watch, the post-modern visuals may distract from how solid the characterisation and thriller elements are. It’s premise that unreliable narrators and biased storytelling and corruption make the truth an almost impossibility to reach is timeless.
It’s a fascinating film where all the artifice isn’t allowed to get in the way of a solid, sad tale of scapegoating.
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The advantage of short films is that coherence is not necessarily as predominant a requirement as with long-form. Felipe Martinez Carbonell’s ‘Imaginary Portrait’ and ‘Echthaar’ by Dominic Kubisch and Christopher Palm both capitalise on the nightmare logic that short horror films can excel in. Both are often gorgeous to look at and a little open-ended that will not frustrate a briefer tale.
‘Imaginary Portrait’ is a picture of a girl trapped at home under the oppression of her father and grandfather. It’s often elegantly presented but not afraid of a monstrous figure walking in the background. It easily conjures outrage and creepiness.
'Echthaar’ has gorgeous monochrome photograph and some vintage pop songs to distinguish it. It packs a Fifties setting, hairdressing and the eeriness of display dummies and jukeboxes into a tale that doesn’t have to make sense, simply beguile. It has a little of that dark, surreal humour that reminds of ‘In Fabric’.
