The other 18 shorts almost all hit a consistent level of quality while landing all over the place regarding tone and content. There is nothing here as bad as the worst shorts in the first film, although a couple do come close: “E,” directed by Alejandro Brugués (Juan of the Dead), with its ridiculous sexism, feels more like a commercial for Axe body spray than anything else. The biggest disappointment this time around is “V,” directed by Jerome Sable (Stage Fright), which uses a cheap “found footage” approach to depict the fate of two extremely unpleasant frat bros who are killed by a pair of prostitutes while one of them is on Skype with his girlfriend. Ugly, gross, and mean-spirited, this short shows none of the unique style or inventiveness of Sable’s slasher-musical feature debut or his excellent short film, “The Legend of Beaver Dam,” that preceded it. Still, the number of fun, memorable pieces is much higher this time around, likely at least partially thanks to the introduction of some guidelines provided by the film’s producers to introduce some quality control (as opposed to the completely free rein given to filmmakers the first time around).
Overall, The ABCs of Death 2 is a fun overview of genre filmmakers from all over the world. Given how much of an improvement this is over the first ABCs of Death, it’s a shame that a third entry in the series has not been announced. Another entry with a level of quality shorts at this level would be very welcome, and help give horror fans a look at even more interesting filmmakers to seek out. On the other hand, maybe it’s better for the producers to quit while they’re ahead.
Absentia (2011)
Originally published on Film Monthly 13 March 2012
Even with the explosion of independent horror films and the new types of distribution out there for these films, there are far too few female-centric, relationship-driven horror films. This type of film is ideal for independent filmmakers on a budget– if your central relationship is well written and strongly acted, you’re most of the way to a solid, memorable film. Writer/director Mike Flanagan’s Absentia is a great example of this kind of film, a seriously creepy take on the haunted house film that strikes a nice balance between character development and scares.
Tricia (Courtney Bell) lives alone in the house she shared with her husband Dan (Morgan Peter Brown), who disappeared seven years ago. As she walks the neighborhood, visibly pregnant, Tricia replaces the “MISSING” signs for Dan with the last batch she had printed. Her sister Callie (Katie Parker), fresh from a lengthy road trip and trying to get clean, arrives to help Tricia fill out the paperwork to declare Dan dead “in absentia,” pack up her belongings and find a new place to live away from the painful memories of the house they shared. The sisters each have surprises for each other: Callie is surprised to find her sister is tentatively entering into a relationship with Detective Mallory (Dave Levine), the police detective investigating Dan’s case, and Tricia is surprised to find Callie is trying Christianity on for size.
As the sisters try to adjust to living together again, Tricia has the added stress of nightmares of Dan reappearing. Before long, these nightmares are bleeding into daytime reality, as Tricia begins seeing Dan in unexpected places. Callie has her own weird experiences with an ominous tunnel near Tricia’s house, where she finds a haggard, panicked man (Doug Jones) who desperately tries to get her to relay a message to someone. As Tricia and Callie’s experiences become more unsettling and potentially dangerous, Callie begins to suspect a supernatural creature is terrorizing the sisters and the neighborhood, but Tricia is convinced it’s all in her head. And unfortunately, the police agree, leaving Callie on her own to confront something she cannot understand.
Absentia wrings serious mileage out of a strong series of creepy dreams and upsetting appearances of Daniel in Tricia’s everyday life. The film opens with many open questions and answers many of them related to the characters, but leaves the exact nature of its supernatural menace maddeningly vague. For the most part, however, this is fine– Absentia is more about the relationship between Tricia and Callie than anything outside their home. Courtney Bell and Katie Parker both give strong performances, and their characters’ relationship is the heart of the film. The mostly simple makeup and effects in Absentia are mostly subtle and carefully deployed, an effective tactic that prevents the creepiness from overshadowing the shifting dynamics of the sisters’ relationship.
Mike Flanagan paces the film strongly, giving the audience just enough time to settle in with the sisters before the weirdness begins creeping in. Giving the audience that time to get to know the characters is key to Absentia‘s success. While some audiences may feel the film’s pacing is perhaps too deliberate, the film’s thick atmosphere of dread and daylight scares will hopefully gain Absentia the attention it deserves. This is one of the best independent horror features of the year, and is worth tracking down for any serious horror fan.
Addicted (2014)
Originally published on Film Monthly 10 February 2015
While the film adaptation of Zane’s best-selling erotic novel Addicted has probably been in the works for a while, it’s probably a safe bet that the announcement of the big-studio adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey helped get Addicted on the fast track to production. The movie certainly beat any other films trying to capitalize on the hype surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey to the punch by several months, dropping theatrically in October of 2014. Now Lionsgate has released Addicted on DVD and unrated VOD just before Valentine’s Day, which also happens to be when a certain other erotic novel adaptation is hitting the big screen. Are we on the verge of the return of the erotic thriller?
Zoe Reynard (Sharon Leal) is a woman who seems to have everything: A handsome, devoted husband named Jason (Boris Kodjoe), two well-behaved kids, a beautiful home, a career in marketing art running her own company. But when Zoe meets sensual, confident artist Quinton Canosa (William Levy), he sparks something inside her she has been trying to ignore. Despite a healthy, active sex life with her high-school sweetheart husband, Zoe wants more. And when Quinton makes it known that he wants Zoe, she finds herself unable to resist. Later, when things get too heavy with Quinton, Zoe finds that she needs something more casual, and strikes up a torrid relationship with Corey (Tyson Beckford), a much younger bad boy with a motorcycle and apparently nothing else to do but hang out in clubs and fulfill Zoe’s ravenous desires.
Knowing that she is on a collision course with disaster, Zoe turns to therapist Dr. Marcella Spencer (Tasha Smith), who listens as Zoe details her conflicted feelings about her sexual escapades. Whenever Dr. Spencer tries to dig into Zoe’s past, Zoe becomes aggressive and confrontational. She claims to remember virtually nothing about her life before meeting Jason. As Zoe’s life spirals out of control, she becomes more and more desperate to uncover the source of her sexual addiction before it destroys her career and her family. But with Quinton’s behavior becoming unpredictable, and him demanding that she leave her family for him, is it already too late? What will happen if the three men confront each other?
While Addicted is a pretty clear precursor to more recent “erotic thrillers” like The Boy Next Door and The Loft, its closest precedent in recent film is Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor. While Addicted does echo a little of that film’s reprehensible moral judgment of its lead character, it also wants to show how awesome it is to have mind-blowing sex with a bunch of super hot guys–something conspicuously absent from Temptation, which is mostly just absolutely terrified of female sexuality. Director Billie Woodruff clearly knows what fans of Zane’s book are buying a ticket to see, and delivers plenty of steamy sex, all the way up until the story requires him to spend most of the last act condemning it. Given that, it is undeniable that Addicted shares some of Temptation ‘s fear of female sexuality, and unsurprisingly also provides a very neat “explanation” for Zoe’s sex addiction.
Thankfully, Addicted also has at least some sympathy for her instead of Temptation ‘s ruthless Old Testament-style punishment of its female lead. Although
in many ways Addicted is a clear throwback to the heyday of the Cinemax-styled erotic thriller and a modest hit, its heavy moralizing may indicate that, Fifty Shades of Grey or no, big studios maybe aren’t quite ready to resurrect that oft-maligned genre. On the other hand, maybe leaving the moralizing behind could result in an even bigger hit. Either way, Addicted is an interesting hint at what a modern version of the “erotic thriller” might be. And if you don’t care about that, it’s solidly acted and nicely shot, and there are a bunch of very attractive people getting naked in it. In this particular case, isn’t that what really matters?
After Last Season (2009)
Originally published on Film Monthly 6 June 2009
Well folks, After Last Season is here and now we have to deal with it.
After causing a small splash on the Internet due to its incredibly bizarre trailer, After Last Season has become hotly debated– is it a real movie? Is it a viral marketing campaign? Is it performance art? I’ll be completely honest here: I drove an hour to see the movie in the suburbs of a large city and I can’t conclusively tell you. What I can tell you is this: there is an actual motion picture called After Last Season, it is playing this week in four theaters, and regardless of what the director’s artistic intent is, this is a film that is completely unlike any you’ve ever seen before.
The film’s plot, such as it is, involves interns at the Prorolis Corporation, a medical research company. The opening scenes show some of them being introduced to an MRI scanner, and then chatting with each other. In another building, a young man is murdered. Sarah Austin (Peggy McClellan) is taking part in an experiment with a new technology that allows one person to send mental images to another using small microchips, and unwittingly shares a vision of the young man’s murder with her fellow intern Matthew Andrews (Jason Kulas). Sarah explains that she began having these visions before the murder, and Matthew, intrigued, suggests they use the device to see if Sarah has another vision so they can stop another murder from happening.
Now, if that sounds like a standard sci-fi thriller, I assure you it’s not. The MRI scanner is a huge cardboard box made to roughly approximate the appearance of an MRI scanner. The Prorolis Corporation appears to be located inside a crowded storage room or warehouse with cardboard walls. The apartment building where the young man is killed seems to be a series of photographs against which at least one actor is green-screened. The images sent by Sarah to Matthew are displayed as crudely-drawn digital animations that look like they predate the founding of Pixar by at least five years, and the scene goes on for what seems like half the film’s 93-minute running time. The film’s sparse “score” is mostly limited to occasional chords that hint at “menace” or “uncertainty.” Weird, unidentifiable sounds run throughout the film, sometimes obscuring bits of dialogue. All this would seem to indicate that After Last Season is a joke, but there’s clearly something more going on here– the film is nothing less than a complete deconstruction of fiction films.
Yes, seriously.
Whenever we watch a film, we should ideally be in a state of suspension of disbelief. The actors, we know, are not actually doctors, scientists, or murderers. The technology we see in films is often fake, just props, but we accept that they are the things they symbolize. What director Mark Region does in After Last Season is a bit like what Hal Hartley does in his “genre” films such as Amateur and No Such Thing, only taken to its logical extreme. In Amateur, for example, there’s a scene where a character staggers on while another shoots him repeatedly, well past the point of absurdity (how many bullets are in that gun, and how many can this guy take and keep walking?). In No Such Thing, Robert Burke plays a monster, but other than his monster makeup Hartley seems content to let cheap props stand in for “science stuff” in the lab scenes.
After Last Season goes much further than that: there aren’t props so much as there are the suggestion of props. Sheets of paper stand in for various things, including chalkboards, dry erase boards, and other printed materials. Region also constantly calls attention to the patently false nature of the film’s sets. For example, in the MRI scene, he cuts in shots of the window with the blinds drawn and the ceiling fan in the room between the intern’s dialogue. These are things that obviously would not be in an actual hospital MRI scanner room. The strange, unnatural performances are also reminiscent of Hal Hartley’s signature theatrical style of acting, only (again) a crude approximation of it. Almost all of the dialogue is completely banal, people discussing places they’ve been or lived and avoiding specifics. Additionally, many scenes clearly have extra time left in them from before or after the take, further calling attention to the fact that these are actors and you are watching a movie.
Whether Mark Region meant for it to or not, After Last Season raises some serious questions about film. If that suspension of disbelief is what makes a film work, he seems to ask, where is the line drawn at which we don’t– or can’t– follow a film’s lead? Is it the acting? The props? The special effects? The writing? Region goes so far in the opposite direction of any other film that it becomes something completely new. And he seems to know it: the thought transfer machine only transfers “simple geometric objects,” making the crude CG animation a stand-in for what Sarah really sees in her mind’s eye in the same way that the film’s cardboard sets and paper props stand in for standard “movie” reality. After Last Season is what I imagine an autistic person might see when watching a film: stripped down to its absolute basics, there’s a lot of talking and some special effects, then more talking and some credits, and that’s it.
After Last Season is the sort of film that will immediately repel about 90% of film viewers in the first five minutes or so– either you’re with the cardboard MRI scanner or you’re not. Viewers who are amused by “bad” or “incompetent” films are likely to think this is the funniest thing they’ve seen since Doris Wishman’s A Night to Dismember. But if you let the film past that defense mechanism of irony that modern audiences have to erect in between themselves and something this foreign, there’s something going on here that is as exciting as it is unnerving. What exactly that is will be up to the individual viewer, but there’s no question that once you’ve seen it, you will never forget After Last Season.
Alien Outpost (2014)
Originally published on the Horror 101 with Dr. AC blog 13 July 2015
Blending sci-fi genre trappings with the rowdy macho camaraderie of soldiers has been a popular mix since James Cameron basically defined the style with Aliens in 1986. There have been a number of knock-offs both big-budget and no-budget since, although it’s rare that anyone gets anywhere near the perfect balance of Cameron’s action/sci-fi masterpiece. Similarly, the number of found footage films has grown exponentially in the last several years as producers constantly look for cheaper ways to get movies in front of audiences to maximize profits. One film that brought something of a new take to this style was Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 in 2009, and while its mix of found footage and faux documentary was well-received, there have been few attempts to replicate its style and structure. The recent UK film Alien Outpost (aka Outpost 37), directed by Jabbar Raisani, seeks to meld the gritty “realistic” approach of District 9 with the character dynamics of military sci-fi to mostly positive effect.
The picture opens with a sequence that establishes a near-future Earth that has barely survived an interplanetary war. Alien forces attacked the planet and were barely defeated, but when the ships retreated they left thousands of alien soldiers (“Heavies”) behind. In outposts around the world, the United Space Defense Force (USDF) tries to weed out the remaining alien forces and protect humans in places where the Heavies have established a presence. But now, ten years after the end of the First Earth War, the USDF outposts are undermanned and underfunded as the rest of the world rebuilds and tries to forget the invasion ever happened. It’s 2033, and a two-man documentary crew follows three new recruits to the notorious Outpost 37 in Afghanistan. 37 is the most dange
rous remaining USDF outpost on the planet, and life for its newest inhabitants promises to be extremely difficult.
During his first brief meeting with the documentary crew, Commander Spears (Rick Ravanello) issues them pistols and informs them in no uncertain terms that anyone staying within the walls of the outpost must be prepared to fight for their lives. And sure enough, before long they find themselves under fire from a group of locals, who until recently had been friendly. There’s a brutal firefight in which a number of the villagers are killed, and later talk turns to why the locals would suddenly begin attacking the base. While no one knows for certain, a theory is put forward that they may be unhappy that there is still a foreign military presence in their country. A disturbing encounter a few days later with an apparent suicide bomber and the subsequent appearance of Heavies suggests that something else may be happening, and soon the men of Outpost 37 must decide between following orders or possibly uncovering and stopping a new alien threat.
Alien Outpost is mostly made up of rough “handheld” footage of the soldiers going about their daily routines and engaging with the enemy, alternating with interviews with the men against flat black backgrounds. This is effective in creating the illusion of documentary and in helping to differentiate the soldiers from one another, which is unsurprisingly difficult when they are all in full uniform taking fire with the camera flailing around. The all-male cast is supposedly made up of soldiers from all over the world, although most of them speak English and appear to be American, and behave like typical “military movie” guys. There are plenty of non-PC jabs thrown between them, and while this is frequently grating the cast does an admirable job of portraying believable relationships between each other. Much more troubling than the coarse dialogue between the men is their incongruously blasé attitude toward mowing down and blowing up dozens of previously friendly villagers, seemingly without attempting to negotiate a peace with them. The result sometimes uncomfortably feels a little like Starship Troopers without the self-aware satire.
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