FrightFest '24 ~ day 5

The Dead Thing

Director: Elric Kane.

With: Blu Hunt, Ben Smith-Petersen, John Karna, Katherine Hughes.

USA 2024. 94 mins.

 

It’s true that many didn’t think this gelled and just bored, but from the languid pace I found an interesting ghost story about the modern malaise of urban hook-up culture. Blu Hunt gives an assured turn as a woman who turns to fleeting sexual encounters to alleviate her dislocation and depression, leading to lust-motivated hauntings. Putting all-encompassing desire at the forefront of motivation gives this its quirk and the atmosphere is of a dreamy urban ambience.

 

 

A Desert

Director: Joshua Erkman.

With: David Yow. Kai Lennox, Sarah Lind, Zacary Ray Sherman.

USA 2024. 100 mins.

 

A solid, sunbaked thriller. A photographer goes on a road trip, bearing a mid-life crisis, and discovers – like so many horrors – that Some People Just Want To Fuck You Up. Even if that’s predictable, there are full-blooded performances, grittiness, beautiful cinematography, and enough inventiveness to make this memorable. A film that will surely earn itself cult status.

 

Ladybug

Director Tim Cruz.

With: Anthony Del Negro, Zachary Roozen, Scout Taylor-Compton, Charlene Tilton.

USA 2024. 107 mins.

 

Second supernatural lover of this Frightfest day. A lead character that does exposition for himself (“Home sweet home!”) and a narrative that takes a little too long to where it’s going, which is nothing objectionable but nothing original. Its best gag is the potential porn potential of the handyman. ‘Goosebumps’ for gay hipster art lovers.

 

Cold Wallet

Director: Cutter Hodierne.

With: Raul Castillo, Josh Brener, Melonie Diaz, Tony Cavalero.

USA 2024. 84 mins.

 

A zeitgeisty small time crime thriller. When their crypto-currency dreams die, a home invasion heist tale kicks in when three Redditors decide to force the CEO to reimburse everyone. Big house, sudden small-time crooks, manipulative CEO. It doesn’t necessarily say a much about people driven to desperate measures, but it does keep in mind the scheming that takes advantage of the needy and hopeful. A minor, unsurprising but solidly made thriller.

 

The Substance

Director: Coralie Fargeat.

With: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid, Hugo Diego Garcia.

USA/France/UK 2024. 140 mins.

 

Broad of satire, unconvincing of detail, full of glorious excess, ‘The Substance’ is an EC Comic horror full of crowd-pleasing absurdity – an extended ‘Creepshow’ tale. If I went in perhaps expecting Cronenberg-lite, in fact the callbacks were to ‘Society’, ‘Basket Case’ and even ‘TerrorVision’, the early films of Stuart Gordon; those grungy, silly, outrageousness, flabbergasting films that were the Eighties output of Empire Pictures and Troma. Surely Cannes can’t be as familiar of this output as the FrightFest audience and had never quite seen something like ‘The Substance’, therefore giving it awards.

 

Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley look gorgeous and give it their all, and there is much amusement in the battle between youth and aging here, even if it never addresses the subjects of narcissism. The film’s call for kindness to yourself across the ages is a sincerely felt one, although the audience was baying with laughter at the inter-generational fight made flesh. Also, despite how much the film insists, they never feel like the same person, as “one”. It is as brilliant as it is stupid. The opening vignette that establishes Elizabeth Sparkle’s (Moore) waning fame is excellent, the constant unsubtlety less so (we get it: Dennis Quaid is gross). Internal logic and answering questions are not really in its interest (how could “Sue” (Qualley) possibly function as a huge star on magazine covers without history? Does she get an audition, accepted and film a show in a week? She taps a hollow wall and finds an empty room behind? Wait, who is behind “The Substance”, what is their agenda and what do they gain?).

 

But the comic book look, the art design, the practical effects are where ‘The Substance’ excels, pushing itself right to the end into a “fuck it” splatterfest until using out-there gore to return us to the beginning with an astute ending whose unsubtlety works. The FrightFest audience rightly treated the whole thing as a comedy with a little grit, stupidity and feminine anger, and for that it is a giddy body horror that wins by taking the lead of the body horror that came before.

 

____

 

And so, another very enjoyable FrightFest is over. I stayed in the main scree where there was lots of head trauma, sex-obsessed ghosts,

 

Favourite picks:

 ·         Stange Darling

• Dead Mail

·         Invader

 

Although the narrative shuffling of ‘Strange Darling’ would usually put me off just as gimmick, the style, the flare, the flirting and interaction of the leads, and intense sound-design all made it a total winner for me.

 

I gave ‘Dead Mail’ a chief place for being a most authentic period piece, for making its excesses prosaic and steeped in the ordinary, for making ordinary working people of the post office pro-active detectives.

 

‘Invader’, because stripped-down brutality accentuating ordinary life is the true stuff of horror for me. And uncompromising home invasion hits a nerve.

 

But it is ‘The Last Ashes’ and ‘A Desert’ that stick in my mind notable as runner-uppers.

 

If ‘The Substance’ was the Frightfest winner, I sadly couldn’t fully invest because it cared not for any subtlety or layers, however much I enjoyed its flare and outrageousness (I had similar issues with Fargeat’s ‘Revenge’). Although I thought  Tsigaridis’‘Two Witches’ showed promise, his ‘Traumatika’ fulfilled none of it. ‘Survive’ seemed to be the one to laugh at (without malice) but enjoyed. And in the enjoyable stakes, ‘The Invisible Raptor’ was far more solid and consistently funny than expected, and I had been waiting a long time to see ‘The Last Trip of the Demeter’, and thoroughly pleasing if unremarkable it was too.

 

The Hitcher’ proved it has always been a winner, and the screening of its new print at FrightFest was a great way to introduce it to a new converts.

 

I heard good things about ‘Protein’, ‘Derelict’ and ‘Charlotte’, so I will be looking out for them.

 

I barely ate the last two days and survived on snacks. By Day 5, I am just a film watching machine and can’t believe it’s coming to an end. I made fine new FrightFest pals and caught up and bumped in old ones between films. Ian Rattray caught me leaving ‘Member’s Only’ early for the night train and stopped for a chat. The most annoying audience was the cast, crew and friends of ‘Members Only’ (what I saw of it) and ‘Traumatika’ that cheered, laughed and clapped frequently at everything; the latter group seemed to laughing be *at* their own film, which was confusing. Seeing ‘Bookworm’ and ‘The Substance’ with a receptive FrightFace audience was thoroughly the best way to see them.

X

X

Writer & Director – Ti West

2022, US

Stars – Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Brittany Snow

 

The opening fly-buzz acknowledges ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’: 1979, somewhere in Grindhouse Hicksville, Texas, where a group of people hire a property next to a creepy house owned by creepy old folk to make an arty(?) porn movie. There are no true story surprises, but Ti West is one of the best at capturing not only period look, but the feel of the films being pastiched. Being true to the spirit of its chosen era, it even stops to let Brittany Snow pick up an acoustic guitar for a song.

 

So what it lacks in originality, it makes up for with details like the opening ratio gag, some vivid editing and shooting and crowd-pleasing gore and violence. The first killing unsettles in its length, and other killings are perhaps less impressive and a killing to "Don't Fear the Reaper" is groan worthy, but by that time, a lot of goodwill has been built up by the slow burn, period homage and mood.  It’s true value is in the strength of its characterisation, which is what Ti West is reliable for. Here’s a small band of porn-makers which, typically, would have been annoying sleazeballs, except for the more innocent/reticent wallflower girl. But here the producer guy Wayne (Martin Henderson) is not just a lecherous manipulative hustler, and Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) isn’t just an annoying sex-crazed vamp, and Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) isn’t simply a disapproving thrill-killer in over her head. And there’s a hint of Nice Guy about RJ (Owen Campbell; obviously one to watch with ‘My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It Too’). There’s complexity to their relationships. It’s layered characterisation, without trying to make them conflicted or apologetic, is quietly subversive. West isn’t sleazy, and although he obviously enjoys exploitation, the quality of the filmmaking – the initial sequence introducing the alligator has been rightly celebrated – and writing rises above just that. But that isn’t to say he scrimps on the nastiness and bloodletting: the first kill is particularly gnarly.

 

But it’s with Mia Goth and her remarkable freckles where the true meat of it emerges. Especially when you discover she plays both Maxine and Pearl. I did not know this going in or realised during. But once I knew this, it only reenforced the themes already obvious, about fear of loss of desirability; about a sex drive outlasting the body. This is a film where getting old makes you murderous when desire and body are no longer in accord. Here comes a bitter old couple, torn between an evangelical television and a group of adults in their prime gleefully making a sex movie. But with the same actor playing both Maxine and Pearl, the picture deepens further: in retrospect, Maxine seems quietly more the disturbed one, snorting drugs and conflating a big sex drive with ambition and fame; Pearl becomes the natural twisted outcome of Maxine’s getting old and not having this satisfied. It's as if this group has been caught in her porny fever dream where, as is the way with slashers, sexual dysfunction emerges as homicidal cum-shots. And without fiercely trumpeting as such, this is a woman’s film (see how the men die first?).

 

This is the truly intriguing stuff, but the film is otherwise simply good slasher fun with superior writing and execution. All this means that already pending prequel, ‘Pearl’, already feels like more than just a cash-in. Although it doesn’t truly transcend its basic genre pleasures, and may be seen as an underachiever for that, it’s certainly exploitation for those that like their horror with reflective pretentions. And did I mention fun?

Cat People - Tourneur and Schrader

 

Jacques Tourneur

USA, 1942

Writer: DeWitt Bodeen

Tourneur’s alternative were-tragedy is a svelt and elegant tale about how sexuality and jealousy makes one woman dangerous. Certainly, Irena is quite charming, sweet, smart and endearing at first – Simone Simon barely seems capable of raising her voice – and that means she is appealing intellectually and disarming. And she’s a Serbian immigrant and therefore exotic, so it’s easy to see how a decent enough all American chap might fall for her. She has a warmth and vulnerability that commands empathy throughout. But this foreignness also comes with troubled ancestry and a delusion that, when this exotic sexuality is tapped, she’ll become a lethal panther. This becomes a problem when she senses her husband falling for another.

But there’s nothing mean to our central love-triangle: there’s a definite maturity to DeWitt Bodeen’s screenplay. When Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) must tell Irena that he’s fallen for someone else, he doesn’t blame Irena for being difficult or stringing him along, but it’s with regret and acceptance of responsibility. Also, Alice (Jane Randolph) isn’t some love rival drawn bad, but often suggesting the more sympathetic actions when dealing with Irena. Moira Wallace writes that “Simone Simon seems by nature to be more kitten than were-wolf”, but that is surely the point, that Irena isn’t a siren seductress, a femme fatale to anyone but herself. After all, “She never lied to us.”

It’s a text wholly built from fear and phobia, from a woman’s fear of her ancestry and sexuality, and of her loneliness and her place in social convention. Undoubtedly also due to budgetary constraints, it nevertheless evokes the eerie and uncanny with a success that a film with more resources probably would not have achieved. Secondarily, it’s the male fear that a woman’s troubled sexuality can’t be trusted, perhaps especially if it’s foreign and exotic. And there is also the hint of lesbianism, not least when a stranger calls Irena “Sister”. It’s also notable that it’s Alice that first believes in the threat and powers of Irena, without much hesitation when she’s confronted by weirdness, while the men mostly patronise, disbelieve and consign Irena to insanity. The men can’t quite see pass their own agendas, and in Dr Judd (Tom Conway), his assumption that his privilege and gender trump all is a wrongheaded arrogance. There are forces at play here that the very straight characters outside Irena are barely aware of.

The film’s major laziness is in suggesting some makeshift cross and Christian declaration might fend off something so primal, as if the film thought it was a somewhat more traditional supernatural monster movie fighting off a pagan threat (and although this can be attributed to Oliver’s beliefs, the film does seem to play along). But the bus moment is one of the genre’s great jump-scares, and there is something truly primal and fearsome in the similarly iconic swimming pool set piece. Rob Aldam writes, 

 “Largely overshadowed by Paul Schrader’s inferior remake, The Cat People is a milestone in horror movies. The way Lewton and Tourneur use shadow in lieu of an actual monster completely revolutionised how films are made. There’s so much more malice in a fleetingly glimpsed silhouette than revealing all your cards to the audience.”

The use of shadows and light are exemplary throughout, shadows becoming bars and obscuring the monster and monstrous so it is always lurking and pending. Tourneur and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca worked on film noir before and put the chiaroscuro to the best evocative use for horror. ‘Cat People’ successfully conjures the uncanny and abstract anxiety, those elements that touch the everyday, perpetual engine of the genre.  The monster revealed is our own fear of ourselves. It’s certainly a text for those who feel like outsiders, even surrounded by decent, sympathising people.

 Paul Schrader

1982 – USA-Japan

Screenplay: Alan Ormsby

Paul Schrader doesn’t think of this as a remake of the Jacques Tourneur classic, which he doesn’t seem to rate, and seems to think the inclusion of a mysterious lady saying “My sister!” is his homage to the original; but it riffs on the swimming pool scene and the famous bus jump-shock and in that way follows similar beats to the original. Schrader’s take is very different and earns that contentious label as a “re-imagining”, but to reject it as a remake is surely a little disingenuous.

What it does do, like Cronenberg’s ‘The Fly’ and Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’, is to take a beloved source material and update it successfully, bringing what was all allusion and suppression in the originals to the surface. For ‘Cat People’, that means all the kink and sleaze and dodgy sexuality is front and foremost. And surely Natasja Kinski nude was a selling point, although this was also in McDowell’s nude period. Oh, and to add incest too. Kinski’s offbeat sexual appeal where she goes from innocent to seductress when discovering she turns into a panther when primal urges are released by sex certainly centres the film. She hangs between Malcolm MacDowell’s sleazy incestuous perversity and John Heard’s wholesome All American machismo.

This was slightly side-stepped in the shape-changing cluster including ‘An American Werewolf in London’, ‘The Howling’ and ‘The Thing’, perhaps because it wasn’t funny or satirical or outlandish, but I always put them in the same pot. The highpoints are McDowell’s creepy leaping on the end of a bed, the arm being pulled off, the unforgettable desert scenes and Giorgio Moroder’s quintessentially Eighties pulsing synth-score: I even think of the orange tint to the dream-desert sequences as an Eighties orange. The score is one I have listened to ever since. Its weaknesses are a couple of moments with female victims that wouldn’t sound out of place in ‘The Man With Two Brains’, and the iconic pool scene that, here, seems to imply that Irena can transform at will, which isn’t in the rules of this version.

The sexuality in ‘Cat People’ walks a line between arthouse and exploitation and its actual standpoint a little hard to pin down. Sexuality is primal, unleashes the beast and perversion: even the ostensibly nice and normal sex between Irena and Paul leads to bondage. Based on this, Gary Arnold calls a Schrader “an exploitation director with delusions of grandeur”,  but that seems pretty self-evident, and hitting that sweet spot between conceived “high” and “low” art is genre privilege. ‘Cat People’ is a near-miss, but still intriguing.

The ending signals tragedy, and it is conceptually better than the run-of-the-mill monster movie ending that Schrader talks of, but it also symbolises a woman’s sexuality being caged up by a man for her own good, and by her own choice. There’s an uneasy murkiness here, but the elements of arthouse and exploitation tame one another to produce something that is quite unique, and certainly beguiling, despite and because of its crude edges and pulsating Eightiesness. 

Teeth

Writer & Director: Mitchell Litchenstein

2007, USA

‘Teeth’ doesn’t dress up its vagina dentata as a hulking monster.  She doesn’t turn into a big cat either. Nope: this is the most direct example of vagina dentata horror, with an excellent poster design making it obvious but not crude (well, the poster above). And that’s how the film plays out: clear but not vulgar. It has a lot of sleaze, but the film itself is not sleazy. It’s not a revenge fantasy, it’s not controversially feminist treatise against the patriarchy. ‘Teeth’ rides from a generation of extreme horror that means there’s no need for analogy, but black humour undercuts grimness and polemic. There’s melancholy and sadness instead of rage and comic book craziness.

Jess Weixler is Dawn O'Keef, a high school spokeswoman for abstinence, wearing her “purity ring” with pride and, it seems, a little out of fear of sexuality. There’s the overly familiar high school setting, a slightly heightened reality, the kind of colour palette familiar from 80s teen comedies – but it feels a little more muted after the cave. The feel is more akin to Bea Grant’s ‘Lucky’: there’s a sadness here. The performances and attention to character are more akin to indie sensibility than John Hughes. They could all be caricatures, and the gynaecologist and the lewd old man certainly verge on that – for comedic effect – but Jess Weixler gives Dawn full-bodied respect rather than just a prudish judgementalism. Similarly, John Hensley as her irredeemable brother Brad manages, through the scuzziness, to project a lost defeatism beneath the nihilism. Even The School Lesson Of The Film’s Theme doesn’t feel too, too obvious… even as the nuclear plant looms over the town.

One of the themes is the insufficient protection given by piety and/or Faith. The “purity ring” is no safeguard against rape. After the attempted rape in the cave, Dawn is forced to confront her sexuality, and there’s also no real room for support at home, what with her dying mother and obnoxious brother. But, you see, it’s not sex that is the problem, but how the boys treat the girls. A little respect will save us all. Although through duplicitous means, when Dawn believes that sex is consensual – he even asks her if she wants to stop, and there is no reason to think he wouldn’t listen her if she said no – it is enjoyable for her and it’s all wonderful. This is not an anti-sex film and one of the subtle enjoyments is seeing whatever fears and reservations dawn has about sex falling away and a new vibrancy comes into her character. It is only when he answers his phone during sex and confesses that he had a bet that reprisals come. The other subtle enjoyment is Dawn realising that she is in control, that her apparent curse is in fact a weapon.

Its successful restraint means this is funny and nuanced where it could have been broad and bluntly vengeful. ‘Teeth’ is an easy watch, even at its darkest and most provocative, doing a fine job of mixing tones of the humourlessly outrageous with grimness and empathy, never short-changing the focus on respect for its young protagonist.