FRIGHTFEST day #4, 2018

HELL IS WHERE THE HOME IS

 

Orson Oblowitz, 2018, USA

Beneath the clunky title is a reasonable minor thriller with enough suspense and slickness to keep interest. The programme says, “Two dysfunctional couples rent a modern luxury desert home for the weekend hoping to sort out their messed-up lives.” You see, that’s your problem right there: “a modern luxury desert home”, remotely located, plus you’re “dysfunctional” – that’s just asking for trouble. The film takes its time setting up its inner threat, laying out the domestic strife and prioritising characterisation so more context is given before the trouble starts. Then potential trouble knocks on the door in the shape of a woman who has broken down and just needs to use the phone. This gets their paranoia going and this is the film’s best sequence. Then there’s the external threat breaking in – the home invasion – and this is swift and, refreshingly, doesn’t linger to let bad dialogue rise to the surface. On the down side, the bad guys here are quite intriguing but this is never really satisfied; but maybe they are inriguing because they are given minimal time. It’s a crime thriller more than a slasher, which makes it a little different in current company. It’s decent and well executed with enough twists to keep things on edge, but it’s unlikely to greatly trouble you much afterwards.

THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIG FOOT

Robert D Krzykowski, 2018, USA

With a title like that like that, I was expecting something more along the lines of ‘Puppet Master’ or ‘Frankenstein’s Army’, but then in the introduction the cast and crew started namedropping John Sayles and composer Joe Kraemer started citing John Willaims as an idol, which meant I quickly reassessed my expectations. Someone said this was like an episode of Spielberg’s ‘Amazing Stories’ and that’s certainly a fair comparison. 

Sam Elliot is the eponymous Calvin Barr, trying to live humbly as real American heroes who have killed the poster boy for fascism are prone to do. This part of the film is all about old age and that Elliot is great goes without saying. Aiden Turner plays Barr as a younger man, killing Hitler: a touch of spy gadgetry is fun and the romantic subplot is the kind that harks to bubblegum romance. We're American myth-making again. The film has a big streak of nostalgia, the kind that starts to coagulate early as this is all about former peaks in life and waning in old age.

Then, as an old man, Barr is approached to kill The Big Foot as it’s causing an illness that might spread throughout mankind, or at least America. As a fabulation, it’s an agreeably oddball conceit that swaps potential fun for earnestness. By the end, you may be moved or feel smothered with Kraemer’s score and the soft hues for its insistence on being emotional.

HE’S OUT THERE

Quinn Lasher, 2018, USA

A somewhat by-the-numbers slasher when a family go to their secluded holiday home – you see, there’s your problem… - unaware that they have been watched there over the years by someone in the woods who is now ready to unleash his craziness. There are fairy-tale trimmings all the way through with a read thread guiding protagonists through the trees and whatnot, but this is just the kind of window-dressing that isn’t half as poignant as it thinks: that fairy-tales are kindred spirits to horror is old, old news. Its most risqué feature is putting two young girls in constant threat, but only in a TV Movie thriller way. It’s fluid and nicely filmed, but with only bland characters to root for against a mask-wearing maniac, there isn’t so much to get to grips with.

TERRIFIED

 

Demian Rugna, 2018, Argentina

You see, the thing I do like about ‘The Grudge’ series is that its premise is just an excuse for a series of scary set-pieces; it’s not so concerned with causes and resolution. There’s some of that to Rugna’s ‘Terrified’ with an entire neighbourhood suddenly suffering from malicious supernatural phenomena. Two paranormal investigators come to sort things out, but really they do nothing except get frightened – and that’s all good. In the paranormal investigation arena, it isn’t insultingly po-faced or obsessed with itself as ‘The Conjuring’ but just gets on with its scares. In the face of true supernatural force, what good would investigators actually do when there is no plot-convenience and a deux ex machina to resolve things? No, more importantly ‘Terrified’ concentrates on the scares. Oh, and there are plenty. And if you’re not unnerved, there’s plenty of creepiness.

The man under the bed/in the closet is unlikely to be forgettable. But it’s the boy corpse at the dinner table - just sat there in broad daylight - that I won’t be able to shake. An example of how well-known scares can still pack a punch when done correctly and with flare, with cutting away just at the right moment and perhaps lingering a little too long at times. All it’s interested in is a neighbourhood under siege by horror set pieces. ‘Terrified’ provides lots of fun in being a showcase for the genuinely unsettling.

TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID

Issa López, 2017, Mexico

It’s hard to think that this film, which has been so warmly received and whose worth and skill are obvious, had such trouble getting accepted, but that’s the story López tells. No one wanted it. But it was apparently taken under FrightFest’s wing and now it’s blooming. It came frontloaded with such a reputation that I dashed from ‘Terrified’ to the Predator statue at the top of The Empire’s stairs to queue for passholder tickets (I was second in line and got the very last ticket for the screening at The Prince Charles cinema). It’s easy to see where its emotional clout comes from as it’s based in the truth of street orphans in Mexico. There is a long history of coming-of-age cinema crossing over with horror – ‘The Secret of the Beehive’, ‘Celia’, ‘Class Trip’… oh, too many to mention – but the obvious reference is Guillermo del Toro in its particular mix of brutal realism and escapist fantasy, harsh truths mitigated with magic realism. Murder and dead kids mix with ghosts, animated toy bears and graffiti coming alive, for example. When her mother goes missing, abducted by the ruthless Huascas, a trail of blood follows Estrella (Paola Lara) everywhere – and indeed, she does seem to get people killed – and she falls in with a street gang for survival. The ostensible leader of this gang is the diminutive but determined Shine (Juan Ramón López) who is both threatened and fascinated by Estrella. When he pickpockets a mobile phone and a gun from one of the Huascas, a fatal run-in with the gang seems assured.

The kids are hunted and ignored and not even acknowledged except as victims by this underworld. There will be no adult help or protection. Despite this merciless context, the kids still find time to believe in wishes and find moments of fun. It’s so good that you won’t really won’t really care that the phone seems to stay charged by the power of narrative, or why the Huascas are so worried about it when the police really don’t want to anything to do with it. Or why the kids don’t just turn it off at important moments. Yet it’s only in the last act that the balance seems to tilt to insistence on magic realism at the expense of some obvious character motivation and behaviour; like Del Toro, ‘Tigers are not Afraid’ uses horror for sentiment that eventually forgoes reflection for escapism. Nevertheless, there is no doubt López has produced something affecting and unforgettable.

Issa López 

FRIGHTFEST DAY #3, 2018

RAVERS

Bernhard Pucher, UK, 2018

One of those “alternative zombie” scenarios: this time, a batch of  over-hyped energy drinks that causes homicidal tendencies turns almost everyone at an illegal rave into quasi-zombies. This horror scenario is the perfect chance for Becky (Natasha Henstridge) to overcome her nervy, germophobic ways and reinvent herself as a survival girl. Elsewhere, the drug dealer (the only black male character – Kamal Angelo Bolden) sees a business opportunity when he sees the drink turns the people into obsessive addicts (“More!”). It’s this angle that distinguishes these brain-dead antagonists: rather than rampant killers, the drink amplifies their neediness (for drugs, drink, dance, sex, etc) to murderous levels when not placated. It’s a gleefully silly party-pleaser but it’s not witty or inventive enough to really break through the standard. And what is worse is that, for a film about a rave, the music doesn’t boost the adrenalin into your memory (whereas in ‘Climax’, it’s immediate and constant), although this might just be a matter of taste. 

HERETIKS

Paul Hyett, 2018, UK

I liked ‘Howl’ well enough, Paul Hyett’s werewolf film, but found ‘The Seasoning House’ woefully misjudged. ‘Heretiks’ is more like the latter, with a bunch of women cut off from the world and subject to abuse and horror, but it’s a marked improvement in that this isn’t constant rape. No, this is a bunch of nuns – which seem currently in vogue in horror – and although it’s set in the 17th century, the period makes less of a mark than the monastery: it could be any era that chooses to cut itself off from the world outside. The Reverend Mother saves women that are about to be condemned as witches by Michael Ironside (a cameo that hints at a charm and wit that the rest of the film doesn’t have, because he can do this in his sleep) and then consigns them to a locked-in repressive existence in the nunnery; but of course, there’s more to it than that and – after a slow and meandering build-up - there’s possession and nun zombies. But there’s nothing new here, it's portayal of good'n'evil being routine, and it quickly runs out of steam, even with its succinct running time. It just doesn’t muster up enough originality to match the potential of its setting and becomes dull long before the finale. But nice glowing eyes on the possessed nuns, though. 

CHUCK STEEL: 

NIGHT OF THE TRAMPIRES

Michael Mort, 2018, UK

FrightFest has presented several teasers for “Chuck Steel” over the years (there’s me in a Chuck Steel mask in 2013), but here it is finally, Michael Mort’s passion project. Chuck Steel is a bombastic, obnoxious lone wolf cop on the edge, a rule-free maverick, etc, who finds himself battling an outbreak of tramp vampires. In this, he is aided by Abraham Van Rental (now there’s a good pun), an increasingly crossdressing boss and a host of sidekicks that keep getting killed off. It’s a homage/satire on those ridiculously testosterone pumped action flicks of the 80s and has plenty of appropriate one-liners and posturing.

The animation is often remarkably detailed and executed – the chaotic car chase earlier on probably being the highlight – and the script is often hilarious. There’s no doubting the commitment and scope of it all:

Animortal created for “Chuck Steel” 425 puppets to represent hundreds of different characters and creatures, and dozens of giant scale-model sets. The stop-motion content was shot at 24 frames per second instead of the usual 12. [Variety]

Introducing it, Michael Mort meekly said that some people found it offensive but the bad taste only helps in making it a great party film. It’s stupid, silly, outrageous and so fast that it skids over its constant retreat to coarse humour when it can’t manage anything else. There are times it falls into the misogyny it mostly satirises, but it is mostly balanced precariously on the right side. As these things tend to do, it runs out of steam and the humour gets a little squashed and shenanigans get a little prosaic as the finale gets bigger and bigger, but the animation is never less than captivating. 

WHAT KEEPS YOU ALIVE

Colin Minihan, 2018, Canada 

Jules and Jackie head off to a forest retreat to celebrate their anniversary, but if there’s one thing horror teaches us is that you should never trust secluded places. Soon, the anniversary is defined by violence. …Here’s one that’s hard to speak about without giving it all away, so if you haven’t, you should come back here only when you have.

Introducing the film, Colin Minihan said it was inspired by his interest in killers that get away with it. From this, he has crafted a slick enough stalk’n’slash tale that surely benefits from the central couple being gay: if Hannah Emily Anderson had been male, this would have been far more conventional and the one-liners more obvious and tiresome. Also, Anderson never finds the segue from lover-to-psycho that wholly convinces: she opts for turning either on and off when required that forgoes a more nuanced deception. What really elevates the film is Brittany Allen’s wordless evocation of a woman struggling to be a Survival Girl through the deceit and heartbreak that gives her a constantly pained look and perspective.

The finale isn’t impervious to that viewer penchant of “Well, what I would do in that situation is” and “Why doesn’t she just do that?” (for me, slightly more thought-out plotting would have prevented this) which weakens the third act even as it tries to carry its twists right to the very end. But it’s the pretty scenery and Allen’s performance and the underlying heartbreak that stayed with me and overcomes any weakness.

UPGRADE

Leigh Whannell, 2018, USA

Genre cinema is currently thick with homages to the 80s flicks that contemporary directors loved as kids: there was even the invite to “Dress in your 80s gear” for FrightFest opening night. And here’s another –  in this case: yes, ‘Robocop’; yes, ‘Terminator’; yes, even ‘Death Wish’, as the FrightFest programme cites. In the near future after a horrific accident and a run-in with bad guys that results in his wife’s murder, Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) is left paraplegic. But then one of his former clients that utilised Grey’s analogue skills at customising old cars implants him with a computer ship that “cures” his paralysis. But then it turns out this implant has a personality of its own, talking to him in his head and calling itself STEM, and it’s more than willing to help him on a mission of vengeance. 

Leigh Whennell of course gets his horror credentials from 'Saw' and (although this wins no kudos from me) the 'Insidious' franchise. In the Q&A, Whannell was keen to avoid condemning technology and was far more neutral: because, of course, technology is just a vessel that can be both good and bad (asked what he would choose if he could have an implant “upgrade” him, he said he would choose one to solve procrastination, which seems sensible to me). The film is pretty good at portraying the joys and perils of technology – for example, the self-driving car is wonderful until it won’t obey voice commands – and it’s near-future is convincing in that (STEM aside) it’s only a few steps away from what we know. It’s fun to see STEM giving Grey the superpowers he needs and Whannell is good at letting the seductiveness of this play right through the audience (we all love a good revenge fantasy). The fight scenes are striking and brutal, the story never forgetting the pleasures of its b-movie silliness and limitations; it’s frequently funny, slickly made and you can feel it being thought-out right until the last moments. Also, Marshall-Green delivers a fine physical and vulnerable performance that gives it all a solid foundation. It was a definite FrightFest favourite and an example of how a little invention and an attentive script goes a long way.

FRIGHT FEST

Ante Novakovic, 2018, USA

A wretched mayor decides that using slimeball horror director to stage a “Fright Fest” in the local abandoned asylum is a good promotional idea. But a bus transporting the criminally insane crashes nearby and… You get the idea. Soon, audiences can’t tell that people are really being killed and the director thinks it’s elevating his art to the next level. That kind of thing – but it’s rough and a faint air of amateurish keeps tugging at it. It’s one of those horrors that aims for satire but ends up as an example of how horror is the most self-loathing of genres, painting its creators as scuzzbuckets and the audience as prurient thrillseekers then stupid then deserving. It’s meant to be bad taste fun but it’s not.

FRIGHTFEST - Day #2

FRIGHTFEST Day 2, 2018

FRIGHTFEST: BENEATH THE DARK HEART OF CINEMA

Chris Collier, 2018, UK

A documentary about this very festival with talking heads from its directors – Alan Jones, Ian Rattray, Greg Day and Paul McEvoy – and film directors and fans. All are faces frequently seen in the lobby and I remember some of the archival footage too (I was there for ‘Big Bad Wolves’, the very last film shown in the huge Empire auditorium before it was IMAXified). Indeed, Collier’s documentary is surely a marvel of editing down what must have been a mountain of footage (editor: Craig Ellis) covering almost twenty years. It balances a focus not only on the films and how influential the festival is on the genre industry, but also on the fact that the audience is fundamentally its driving force. From the Prince Charles to the Vue to the Empire to Shepard’s Bush and back to the Empire, this covers key moments from each and paints a picture a small group of very different organisers united by common cause. I mean, of course I love the festival, a period of life where all you have to worry about is getting to the next film and then talking about it with people whose name you may not know just yet. When you tell people you’re going to a film festival, it doesn’t convey to them how much of a party it also is. Collier’s documentary does capture much of that spirit and provides a concise glide over its long history that will surely satisfy regular attendees and intrigue genre fans that are yet to indulge in its goodies. 

BRAID

Mitzi Peirone, 2018, USA

Three women holed up in a mansion, psychologically crumbling in a miasma of abstraction, toys and childhood games. …and in this way, perhaps it can be seen as similar to Pascal Laugier’s ‘Incident in a Ghost Land’ as they both follow the In The House We Go Crazy template, but they are poles apart. Peirone begins as she means to go on from the start with beautiful, arty images and equally arty camerawork, but this also means there is nowhere to go to, aesthetically. This all fits the temporal displacement and the circular trajectory of the narrative but ultimately there is no progression.

It’s a mood piece, then, and as a style-over-substance experience it’s pretty and looks like an unhinged photoshoot from some ‘Homes & Gardens’ magazine. There is a tale being told on the periphery and possibly a second watch will bring it all into focus, but for all its successful fragmentary mood, there is the sense that something at the centre isn’t quite gelling. 

PUPPET MASTER: THE LITTLEST REICH

Sonny Laguna & Tommy Wikund, 2018, USA

Well, you surely know what you’re getting with a title like that and the main point of intrigue was that this is written by S. Craig Zahler who, like Jeremy Saulnier, is one of the most interesting and thrilling voices on movie violence currently working. To that end, perhaps there is a slightly higher quality to the dialogue and it’s perhaps a dash less tacky than expected, but it is what you expect and no more. They’d probably be silly for trying anything truly different. There’s a wonderful animated credits sequence and then there’s gathering in a hotel of people about to sell their antique puppets, but the puppets have plans and prejudices of their own. The best kill is perhaps the man who gets to piss on his own decapitated head and the most outrageous (of the entire festival) is the puppet gutting a pregnant woman.

So when you have gore humour as your chief aim, the allusions to the Holocaust isn’t really going to stick. But it’s all amusing enough in a bad taste manner.

THE MOST ASSASSINATED WOMAN IN THE WORLD

Franck Ribiere, 

Belgium/UK, 2018

This is the one that I saw that surely deserved more attention. Based around 1930s Grand Guignol theatre and its celebrated star Paula Maxa, the actress killed onstage more than 10,000 times in 60 different ways (it says). It’s a fabrication based on her biography and a sporadically successful look at masochism and the use/need of horror for entertainment and expression. It throws in a serial killer, moral outrage and a so-so romance. Most of all, it’s evocation of the plays and atmosphere are fascinating, raw and convincing; equal to ‘The Limehouse Golem’ in reconstruction of performances, and in capturing the thin line between the audience and the stage. Here’s the origins of FrightFest. The old-fashioned Gothic atmosphere hooks even as the sensibility and convolutions has a decidedly contemporary genre self-awareness. Flawed but evocative in all the right places.

INCIDENT IN A GHOST LAND

Pascal Laugier, France/Canada, 2018

Pascal Laugier seems to me to be a most divisive director, but I will always love ‘Martyrs’ for being an uncompromising and angry slab of horror with a real target. ‘Incident in a Ghost Land’ may prove similarly gruelling/tedious for some: the man next to me said, “I dozed off and when I woke again, some woman was still being battered around and then there were two or three lines of dialogue.” It’s hard to argue with that but Laugier here presents something that ‘Martyrs’ might have been if it been more a routine horror without such a furious agenda. Typically, Laugier plays with genre a little: home invasion… wait, is this a ghost story? A Gothic home full of dolls and toys. Antagonists straight out of ‘The Hills Have Eyes’. Some deception… It may seem a mixed bag, but Laugier is like a brutal Ti West, attuned to genre and aiming for something higher. Dennis Harvey writes, “The rest of us will again feel a tad queasy about the way Laugier meticulously showcases sadism while seeming comparatively indifferent to matters of basic storytelling logic and suspense.” But few directors seem to convey the relentlessness and visceral nature of these kinds of horror films quite so artfully (and nobody seemed interested in the more elegant ‘House of Voices’ or ‘The Tall Man’). And he seems to push for the truths on the other side of the volence. Don’t be distracted by the sadism into thinking there is not a clear intent. All those hints of tales within tales and alternative realities may be a further clue. There’s always more at work beneath the surface of a Laugier film.

BOAR

Chris Sun, 2018, Australia

A fine old school monster movie with clunky-impressive practical effects rather than CGI. Something is rampaging through the fences and livestock in the Australian outback, just as a typically squabbling family is paying a visit to a relative. You know how this goes, but there’s the wonderful Mick Jarret whose friendship with another old timer is genuinely as touching as it is brusque; Nathan Jones goes hand-to-tusk with the oversized beast; women give as good as the get; there’s gore and a little no-nonsense mercilessness to the kills (mostly). Not remarkable but hugely likeable creature feature. 

FrightFest - Day 1

FRIGHTFEST DAY #1,  2018

It’s that time of year to binge-watch genre films of a more hard-edged if not outrageous nature. The Empire Leicester Square has been upgraded so that now it is moodily underlit and promotional vids are projected on the stairs as you walk in – and it’s quite trippy walking up FrightFest artwork and dripping blood for the screens. This year, there were more adverts, less Q&As and – as I was in the main screen – cheering and applause each time a film was fronted by a disclaimer that it was not the IMAX experience. If nothing else, it’s great to see these films on such a big, big screen, so big that you can see the grain on some prints. I always pledge to spend more time in the lobby, but then I find it so crowded that I just have to get outside. And outside in Leicester Square, there was a Pennywise the clown and a short Predator to pose with. Inside, there was a giant predator statue to queue up to for alternative screen tickets and some guy walking around as “The Nun”, which is apparently the next horror icon. And so to the films…

THE RANGER

Jenn Wexler, 2018, USA

‘The Ranger’ follows the regular and reliable formula of taking an authority figure and endowing him with psychosis and one-liners and then unleashing them on a group of obnoxious teens. It’s a version of the ‘80s – introducing the film, director Wexler talked of the period being deliberately vague – and the young punks are on the run after a druggy night out goes wrong and decide to hide out in the woods in a deserted cabin. It’s Chelsea (Chloe Levine – from favourites ‘The Transfiguration’ and ‘King Jack’) who knows the place – it was her late uncle’s – but her punk friends don’t quite fit in with a rural, peaceful scenery and soon she’s pissed at them for tagging trees with graffiti. They’re quite the obnoxious bunch, the kind of nihilistic punks you find in ‘80s genre flicks, so for sure the park ranger they bump into will teach them to respect the greenery. The first big audience FrightFest cheer was when he shoots the blaring boom box and one of the punks. Jeremy Holm makes for an endearing rather than shit-eating psycho and Levine probably provides more texture than needed and there's a smidgen of ambiguity to her character and stirs a little intrigue. There’s inventiveness enough to the kills with the one-liners doing the necessary punning, but it’s undemanding and easily disposable.

SUMMER OF 84

François Simard &; Anouk Whissell & 

Yoann-Karl Whissell, 2018, Canada

‘Turbo Kid’ was a favourite with me and a brilliant recreation of Eighties low-budget straight-to-video sci-fi cash-ins. This time, in a filmed introduction to their new film, the directors warn this will not be like ‘Turbo Kid’ but they do a similarly consummate job of capturing the era this time without it being part of the humour. In fact, ‘Turbo Kid’ is likely to be the kind of thing that ‘Summer of 84’s shabby group of teens are likely to rent on VHS. They’re just a regular mixed bag, although the film doesn’t make anything of their outsider status but plenty of their convincingly ripe dialogue. The problem is that imaginative soul Davey (Graham Verchere) is convinced that his neighbour Officer Mackey (Rich Sommer) is actually the Cape May Slayer that’s been putting so many faces on milk cartons. Soon, he has convinced them all to embark upon a teen detective mission that is as old as ‘Emil and the Detectives’, ‘The Famous Five’, ‘The Hardy Boys’ and all that: kids against the wrongdoing adult world. And that’s how it plays out for the most part, against a milieu of period detail that is pleasingly organic and underplayed.

But by the end, the true horror of doing the right thing leading to loss, trauma and paranoia makes this an upsetting and deeper tale than perhaps expected. Davey sobbing alone against a backdrop of board games symbolises that some games and adventures lead to dire consequences. It’s more haunting than expected and proved a FrightFight highlight. This is a directorial team that is proving reliable in delivering the goods and I will always be interested in what they do. 

MEGA TIME SQUAD

Tim van Dammen, 2018, New Zealand

Pulling a small-time robbery, John (Anton Tennet) finds himself in possession of a Chinese time-travel device that comes in handy when he falls foul of the local small-time criminal boss. Soon, he is forming his own gang by duplicating himself with the intention of becoming a criminal mastermind.  So no, it’s not horror but it’s very funny genre excursion, benefiting from van Dammen’s insistence on riffing on colloquial dialogue. It treads that very fine line that Kiwi comedy has of making its characters amusingly dim but not stupid (whereas an American comedy is more prone to plunge headlong into the stupid), between the zany and attentiveness to genre needs. Van Dammen provided special-effects for another FrightFest comedy winner, ‘Deathgasm’, and here the many Johns multiply seamlessly with the otherwise staple lowlife criminal shenanigans. And all the time, it treats its genre conceit with restraint and credibility. It’s the frequently irreverent and antagonist interplay that provides most of the humour and the slyest gag is that, in the end, the person John can trust least is himself. 

Angus

Patrick Read Johnson, 1995        - USA/UK/Germany 

screenplay: Jill Gordon ~ from a short story by Chris Crutcher

“Fat kid” Angus’ (Charlie Albert) ambitions in life veer between talking to Melissa, to stop being picked on and to go to Jefferson. His only friends in this are his truck-driving mum, his ever-dozing grandfather who is over seventy and just getting married, and his geeky pal Troy. Luckily, coming-of-age conventions will help out and he’ll get his moment.

          ‘Angus’ is conventionally and agreeably on the side of the big kid, and it’s funny and winning enough and not quite as smug as something offered by John Hughes, but it’s firmly embedded in tropes and predictability. You’re unlikely to miss its message of “freaks” being absorbed into the “normal” – his suit is plum and everyone else is in blue: wow! the same colours as his science experiment!* – but if you do somehow miss it, even though it’s been hammered home many times, Angus will speechify it at the prom showdown. For the most part, the agenda reaches the tenor of one of the tossed-off faux-poignant slogans projected on Troy’s bedroom wall: “Love stinks / Reality Bites”. It’s set at the same level of insight and symbolism as a TV show for tweens… and it’s true I probably bought into liked it more when I was younger. It’s one of those American Teen movies designed to be a reassurance and outcry against the realities of an outsider’s existence.

Each character is defined by how they don’t quite conform, as if they’re wearing allocated badges. Angus’s mum is a truck-driving, arm-wrestling female, challenging gender stereotypes but sadly not using Kathy Bates enough. There is Grandpa Ivan (George C Scott), dozing off at strategic moments, playing chess in the park, but at 72 (oh, 73) about to get married to a women thirty years his junior, challenging ageism. And even Angus himself is not your average nerdy, dejected fat kid, for he makes his worth at football (the point being that others overlook his contribution to the game) and just wants to get along and can stand up for himself. In fact, one of the more successful subversions of stereotypes has Angus frequently breaking the nose of jock bully Rick from the age of five; the unspoken gag/point is that here’s a bully we see continually getting hurt and pounded as a result of his own pranks, yet never stops bullying (but don’t worry, because he’ll get his). But there is a moment when Angus’ mum lists some of the humiliations her son has to go through at school which seems to hint at a parallel film, perhaps a less broad and less contrived exploration of his plight more in tune with the minutiae of his experience.

And then there’s Troy (Chris Owen): he’s Angus’s best

friend, small, big-eared and socially inept ~ surely a missed poster-boy for ‘Gummo’ ~ who isn’t challenging anything really, but just sticking by his big pal. It’s probably this friendship and Angus’ relationship with his Grandpa that resonate most: they are fluid, funny and relatable. Much is made of the childishness of both Angus and Grandpa Ivan: they bicker like siblings; they both have big dates with idealised women (females don’t do well here); the two run parallel with grouching Grandpa George C Scott representing lost chances. It is also only late into the film that it is obvious that Troy is far more physically abused than Angus and yet seems to be intent only in aiding and abetting Angus’s goals in life, thereby revealing Angus in a more self-pitying light. But the film only briefly touches on this foible. Again, the film misses a chance to delve deeper into character and instead goes for tired chess analogies instead. Even so, the film holds its own with the endearing performance of Charlie Talbert as Angus ~ reputedly found in a Wendy bar queue.

And what would a coming-of-age film without a great soundtrack of the times? Personal highlights are opening credits with a marching band playing along to Love Spit Love’s ‘Am I Wrong?’, starting things on a high, and slow-dancing to Mazzy Star’s ‘Fade into You’.

     

• And much is made of the embarrassment this plum suit, but we see him a black suit for the wedding, so…?

Lean on Pete

Andrew Haigh, 2018, UK

An excellently performed little heart-breaker, directed by Andrew Haigh with restraint and the deliberate tempo of barely stifled tragedy. The title and premise – a boy and his horse – probably conjure something more fluffy and more obviously manipulative, but ‘Lean on Pete’ has more in common with the subdued tone of its young star Charlie Plummer’s debut film, ‘King Jack’. 

Plummer proves to be one of what must be the most naturalistic and convincing teenagers in cinema and can carry an entire film effortlessly. As a character, Charley is mild, resourceful, vulnerable and capable in equal measure with the determination to just keep going on his own terms: this isn’t rebellion or defiance; it’s just what he knows. He comes from a negligible and unstable but not uncaring home-life with his dad (Travis Fimmel) and falls into work with the irascible Steve Buscemi who races horses into the ground for a meagre living. Charley is looking for something to call his own and soon takes to the horses, especially one called Lean on Pete who becomes his confidante as things get tough. And yet, this otherwise admirable independence alludes to the neglect and displacement that Charley has subsumed into his character: his indifference to authority isn’t a sign of insurgence but rather his inability to see and accept more official forms of assistance because he doesn’t feel a part of a more mainstream culture.

All the characters appear to have reached points of acceptance of their lot; this is not a world of aspiration. Charley’s dad is more a best buddy than a father, getting by on what remains of his shit-eating good-ol’-boy charm to win women as he forgoes stability. Buscemi is a master of projecting a twitching humanity suffocated by disappointment and self-loathing but even his Del seems to be trying to find a way to be empathic to the boy despite himself. Chloë Sevigny is the obvious port-of-call for sympathy but even she is broken by the knocks she has taken and callously repeats that you can’t treat horses like pets: “…they’re just horses”, she repeats like a mantra trying to convince herself. Later, Charley falls in with a couple of jocks who just want to play games, drink and sleep. They barely seem to care when he joins them. Elsewhere, dramas of abusive relationships play out across assumptions of what gender roles should be. It feels like a dead-end environment where empathy rears up regardless of the cruelty and apathy it’s up against. In that way, it captures the tone of drama lived rather than always announcing itself.

It’s a film that never quite does what you might expect. It’s not that Charley is always badly treated, but he just wants to do things his own way and walks away from official help multiple times. You get the impression that most people he leaves behind really would want to know he’s okay. He gets by on charity, pity, luck and just plain kindness. And when it calls for it, the strength to hit back: don’t mess with a downtrodden and determined teen with nothing to lose. It’s what Common Sense Media calls a “traumatically beautiful drama”, which may seem a somewhat clumsy description but is indicative of the contrasting forces always at work visually and dramatically.

Magnus Nordenhof Jønck’s cinematography presents bright and clear vistas of the Pacific Midwest, through which Charley marches on, resolute to reach his aunt through chronic sunburn, loss and homelessness. The scenery is wide open to him but, as placid as he may seem, it’s no match for his determination. All the time, the slow burn on misfortune and luck carry him onwards. Peter Debruge finds Haigh’s low-key approach distancing and problematic, but this isn’t so much making Charley unrelatable as the film giving him a respectful space to do things his way. It’s a careful tone that doesn’t high-light self-pity because it’s protagonist doesn’t. In this way, it’s more like the more observational coming-of-age dramas like ‘American Honey’ or even ‘The Florida Project’, but it’s still something warm and ragingly empathic. Ultimately, it is a thoroughly moving ramble through a rites-of-passage that doesn’t even feel like heroic overcoming-of-the-odds, but rather just how things are for this kid. 

The Secret of Marrowbone

Sergio G. Sánchez, 2017, Spain 

Evidently running from domestic horror, a mother and her children escape to a remote big house and call themselves Marrowbone (now there’s a name that’s trying hard). There, they try to hide away and keep to themselves, at least until Jack (George MacKay) turns twenty-one. But the ghosts of the past are not easily shaken, even when she declares that they should all have collective amnesia of it.

While other recent horrors are trying to stretch the ambient and ambiguous corners of horror, and where dramas like ‘First Reformed’ and ‘Custody’ utilise horror techniques and atmospheres, ‘The Secret of Marrowbone’ is agreeably old school in its gothic genre intents: there’s a family secret and there’s a crumbling house. These are essential ingredients for this kind of thing and, mostly, Sergio G. Sánchez’s script directs with attentiveness to shadows and delivers with decent scenes of creepiness – the youngest son chasing after dice and a descent through a chimney, for example. But there’s some negligible dialogue, some confusing geography and messing around with temporal displacement. There’s also an archness that belies a faint air of awkward over-insistence as things are put in place, but after the set up it gradually settles down and gets better. Like Sánchez’s renowned script for ‘The Orphanage’, there’s obvious thought and planning here that means that the final revelation is mostly earned. Or you may roll your eyes. But it’s a decent if minor and self-conscious thriller where – as with ‘The Orphanage’ – Sánchez proves ultimately as ruthless as he does sentimental.