Wound (2010)
Originally published on Film Monthly 6 March 2012
If you’re ever in a really good mood that you feel like wrecking, you may want to pop Wound into your DVD player. In a mere 77 minutes, your cheer will have turned to misery while you wonder what the hell you just watched, and why you watched it. And why anyone would have made it. And why anyone else would release it. The short version is: Wound is the sort of surreal low-budget horror film that happens when someone is a huge David Lynch fan but somehow completely misunderstands what actually makes David Lynch films work. So while Wound is certainly not short on bizarre, unsettling imagery, none of it feels like it adds up to much of anything.
Wound runs on two parallel story lines. In the first, Susan (Kate O’Rourke) is a shut-in telemarketer, living in the home where she grew up with her parents and still sleeping in the same bed she had as a child. Her father returns from abroad and Susan bashes him over the head with a baseball bat. The audience can assume that their relationship is probably not that great, a suspicion that is verified when Susan puts on a creepy mask and ritually murders him. This may sound like a spoiler, but all this happens in the first five minutes of the film. After this, it gets weird, with Susan making phone calls to dead people and engaging in elaborate submission/domination games with Master John (Campbell Cooley), a character whose nature and exact relationship to Susan is never explained.
In the second story, a troubled young girl named Tanya (Te Kaea Beri) is confronted by her high school guidance counselor about her relationship with her boyfriend Mark (Matt Easterbrook) before being informed that her biological mother has been found. Tanya appears to be having some sort of troubles with Mark, who is only seen in dreamy flashbacks (or fantasy sequences?), and the discovery of her birth mother seems to traumatize her. While she tries to decide what to do with this information, she and a friend visit an underground S&M club where a massive, thoroughly tattooed man in a pig mask rapes her on the bathroom floor. Following this, Tanya heads out to confront her biological mother, who unsurprisingly turns out to be Susan.
Once Susan and Tanya meet, any semblance of coherent plot that Wound had completely disintegrates, and the film turns into a series of increasingly bizarre and grotesque scenes that feel more like writer/director David Blyth had a notebook of gross stuff he wanted to put in a movie than any continuation of the film’s already near-impenetrable narrative. When the film reaches its conclusion, it’s tough to really care much about what’s going on since there are no people in the film who act like human beings at all, so there’s no real way to gauge what is supposed to be “actually” happening in the action of the film and what may be delusion or hallucination. It is also difficult to decide whether the fact that Blyth gives a pretty clear indication at the end of the film of why things get so crazy after Susan and Tanya meet is a cop-out or a small nod toward acknowledging most audiences would be utterly lost by that point.
Perhaps the main problem with Wound is not that it borrows liberally from surreal and transgressive horror films in general, but that it seems largely inspired by David Lynch’s Inland Empire specifically. Blyth even lifts the recurring motif of the train horn blowing on the film’s soundtrack, and coupled with the film’s symbol system (recurring masks, animal heads, characters appearing in different places they could not be, etc.) and the fact that lead actress Kate O’Rourke spends much of her screen time in terror and agony, it’s not too hard to imagine Blyth seeing Inland Empire and determining that he could greatly improve it by cutting its length by two-thirds and adding in some pig mask rape and a scene where one character’s penis is graphically scissored off. If that was indeed the case, he was definitely wrong. Instead of being mysterious and compelling, Wound just comes off as pretentious and gross, ugliness for its own sake.
Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006)
Originally published on Film Monthly 27 April 2008
As a general rule, I am not a big fan of romantic comedies. However, there are always exceptions to any rule–let’s say a film that claims to be “a love story” in its title has its protagonist committing suicide before the opening credits are even finished. That film has my attention right away. Wristcutters really is a love story at the core, but one that is quite unlike any you’ve seen before.
Zia (Patrick Fugit) kills himself after his longtime girlfriend Desiree (Leslie Bibb) leaves him. He soon discovers that there is a special afterlife reserved for suicides: everything is pretty much exactly the same as it is here on Earth, only “a little worse.” There’s not a lot of color, no one smiles or laughs, and there’s hardly any way to tell it apart from life aside from the fact that “How did you off?” seems to have replaced “Do you come here often?” as a standard pick-up line. Zia gets a job at Kamikaze Pizza and a tiny apartment with a chronically-depressed German named Erik (Abraham Benrubi), who constantly complains about Zia’s roommate etiquette (eating the last of the cottage cheese, for example).
Fortunately for Zia, he meets Russian rock musician Eugene (Shea Wigham) and his family. They become drinking buddies and things seem to be getting if not better, then at least tolerable. Eventually, Zia gets word that Desiree has offed herself and he talks Eugene into driving him around to go look for her. On the road, they meet Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), a young woman convinced that there has been a mistake and that she did not in fact kill herself. She’s traveling around looking for the people in charge, but there have only been vague whispers that such people even exist. Their travels lead them to a small camp of outsiders run by Kneller (Tom Waits).
Then things get weird.
Wristcutters is a refreshing, unique film. It is very funny and its bored afterlife is an ingenious take on the concept of Limbo: no one ever leaves because it’s so much easier not to bother. The dialogue and performances are great across the board, especially Shea Wigham as Eugene. The soundtrack helps keep things lively (no pun intended) with some great songs by Gogol Bordello. And it’s hard not to smile when you realize the miserable little dive bar is playing Joy Division on the jukebox. For a film whose story is based in such dark subject matter, Wristcutters is surprisingly life-affirming.
Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings (2011)
Originally published on Film Monthly 26 October 2011
And so the Wrong Turn franchise has reached its fourth installment, which in this case is The Prequel. After a promising opening segment that teases the film will actually take place decades before the other films, Wrong Turn 4 jumps ahead to what seems like a week or two before the first film, so any hope of getting an origin story on the series’ cannibal hillbillies goes out the window pretty much right away. But I suppose that makes sense, given that this is more the type of sequel that just hopes to deliver more or less the same thing that made the previous installments popular, and besides, trying come up with all those 1970s costumes would have taken forever and totally wouldn’t have been worth the effort, right?
In the year of 2003, a group of college students head to a remote cabin for some hard partyin’. However, on the way there, they take a wrong turn (see what they did there?) and end up instead at an abandoned mental hospital tucked away in the mountains. The group decides to hole up in the hospital until the morning when they can resume their search for their friend’s cabin, and in the meantime they explore the “spooky” hospital, which looks like it has been abandoned for approximately ten days. There’s some dust and things are knocked over, but mostly the place seems intact. Maybe that’s because the mutant hillbilly cannibals who live there keep the place from getting too messy. Maybe not.
Anyway, the kids wander around and start getting picked off by the insane cannibals. Some of the practical effects look effectively nasty. All of the CG effects look embarrassingly awful. Before long only a handful of kids are left, with the male contingent getting mostly knocked out of action fairly early on. This is perhaps the most interesting thing about Wrong Turn 4: for the most part, it seems like the ladie
s are in charge. Once things start getting crazy, assertive Kenia (Jennifer Pudavick) takes the lead and starts putting together the plans to keep everyone alive, and badass Sara (Tenika Davis) is one of the first of the group to arm herself. On the other team, the mutant cannibals just giggle and shriek and eat people. They don’t have much personality to speak of, but the subtitles helpfully distinguish which of them is grunting or making other noises at any given time.
There’s nothing in Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings that you haven’t seen before, and seen done considerably better elsewhere. It’s nice to see ladies kicking some ass, but other than that this is a bland, standard-issue slasher with little to recommend it. If you want some sex, there’s some at the beginning of the film and a tiny bit later on. If you want cackling cannibals eating pieces of still-screaming victims, there’s plenty of that. But if you want anything other than cheap “thrills,” you will be sorely disappointed.
Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead (2014)
Originally published on the Horror 101 with Dr. AC blog 5 August 2015
Barry (Jay Gallagher) is trying to make his way across the Australian Outback to find his sister Brooke (Bianca Bradley) after the zombie apocalypse begins. Along the way Barry meets up with other survivors including Benny (Lenny Burchill) and Frank (Keith Agius), and they discover that whatever has caused the apocalypse has also caused all flammable liquids to become completely inert. However, it has also made the blood of the zombies into a combustible fuel that can replace gasoline in a car. The men rig up a system to drain zombies and keep their truck running, but find their solution is not quite as simple as they think. Meanwhile Brooke is captured and experimented on by a disco-dancing mad scientist (Berynn Schwerdt) trying to determine why some people seem immune to the zombie "virus." His experiments give Brooke strange new powers, but will they be enough to keep her alive?
Despite a constant stream flowing into an already glutted market, independent horror filmmakers just can't seem to give up on the zombie movie. Sifting the good stuff out of the mountains of middling-to-awful takes on supremely tired material is occasionally worthwhile – see Jeremy Gardner's brilliant The Battery for a modern "zombie movie" that actually feels like something different and new – but it can be a slog. Director/co-writer Kiah Roache-Turner's crowd-funded Australian zombie movie Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, receiving a U.S. home video release from Shout! Factory and IFC Midnight (following a brief theatrical run earlier this year), is one of the better examples of this type of film. Even so, there's not much to make it truly memorable.
The problems with Wyrmwood start pretty much right away with an opening scene that displays some awful CG blood effects that stand in stark contrast to the film's effective practical makeup and special effects. The CG blood is used throughout, and while it's understandable that the filmmakers would want to get the most out of their limited budget, these effects are just too distractingly cheap not to pull the viewer out of the action. An arguably worse offense is the film's constant callbacks to genre classics, never passing up a chance to shoehorn in a slam-bang Evil Dead weapons-and-gear montage and some desperate attempts to conjure up the kind of personality found in weirdo Australian genre films like Body Melt and Undead. For viewers new to the zombie movie, this might be some exciting stuff, but to genre veterans it all just feels exhaustingly familiar.
That said, Wyrmwood's biggest fault is also probably its greatest strength: sibling filmmakers Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner are (like fellow countrymen the Spierig Brothers) clearly huge horror fans. The film hits all the expected notes of a contemporary zombie movie, but instead of feeling perfunctory, the Roache-Turners attack the material with obvious enthusiasm. When they go with practical makeup and effects, they go all-out with great zombie makeup and big splashes of the red stuff. There are some interesting concepts for vehicle designs for both our heroes' makeshift blood-running jeeps and the villainous military characters' electric assault trucks. And while the story beats are familiar, at least they're trying to introduce a few new wrinkles to some well-worn material.
S!F/IFC have given Wyrmwood a solid home video release on Blu-ray and DVD. Special features include material from the brothers' crowd-funding campaign including a 7-minute "teaser" scene (basically a proof-of-concept made by the filmmakers to generate interest in the project), behind-the-scenes featurettes, storyboards, several deleted scenes, and a theatrical trailer. Fans will likely be most excited by the full-length commentary track by the Roache-Turners, which confirms their genuine enthusiasm for the genre. Overall, Wyrmwood is an above-average modern independent zombie movie with an accent, nothing more or less. Anyone who somehow isn't completely tired of this kind of flick will probably find it highly enjoyable, but horror fans who have seen a lot of cinematic shamblers may find everything a little too familiar to be much fun.
Yellow (2013)
Originally published on Film Monthly 15 July 2013
Homage is a tricky business. Lean too hard on an influence without moving into outright mimicry (i.e. Ti West’s The House of the Devil), and a filmmaker risks being labeled derivative. Stray too far from that influence, and the audience might not recognize what is being paid homage in the first place. This is especially difficult for low-budget independent films, and the more intangible the signifiers of the genre or style up for tribute, the tougher it is to replicate the look and feel. The Italian Giallo film is a popular style for filmmakers to reference these days, thanks to a resurgence in popularity due to such deft homages as Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani’s Amer and Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio. Many independent filmmakers have been adding their voice to the conversation, with varying degrees of success. One such film is Chicago-based writer/director David A. Holcombe’s debut feature Yellow.
Arianna (Margaret Grace) is a young woman living in the big city, working as a hair stylist. One night she decides to call up a phone sex chat line and strikes up an unusual rapport with Jackie (Jill Oliver). Her friend Renee (Kyle Greer) tries to get her to be more social and defends her against everyone else working at the salon where they both work, but other than Jackie and Renee, Arianna’s life is lonely and frightening. She spends most of her time holed up in her apartment, plagued by nightmares and the target of occasional harassment from her apartment building’s conspicuously European handyman. Around the time her boss Lyla (Shelley Nixon) fires Arianna for stealing from the salon, bodies start to pile up. Is Arianna hiding a murderous secret? Or is someone else killing the people causing her grief?
Yellow purports to be a “modern Giallo horror film,” but it has more in common with the type of female-centric 1970s psychological “horror” films that descended from Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, like George Romero’s Season of the Witch. Arianna is in nearly every shot of the film, and the dark, cramped interiors give the film a powerfully claustrophobic atmosphere which, again, is reminiscent of Repulsion. There are a few scenes drenched in colored lights that hint at the filmmaker’s main influence, although the lurid red lights recall Argento’s Suspiria (whose status as a Giallo or horror film is arguable) more than any straight-up Giallo films. Unsurprisingly, however, Yellow‘s look is its biggest strength, shot on sharp digital video with interesting compositions and colors. There’s almost always something interesting to look at during the entirety of the film’s brief running time.
That said, Yellow does suffer from some typical problems of independent horror films, including some iffy blood and makeup effects and an inconsistent score that becomes grating near the end of the film. Margaret Grace is a solid lead actress, but the other performances are all over the place. Part of the problem with the cast may be the film’s uncertain tone, however– the other people working at Arianna’s hair salon range from sympathetic to cartoonishly villainous, and it’s difficult for the audience to tell how they are supposed to feel about these characters before they start getting bumped off by the (appropriately black-gloved) killer. The dialogue is probably where Yellow falt
ers most glaringly; another draft or two of the script may have helped iron out some of the more awkward phrasings the characters use. As an attempt to update the Giallo formula, Yellow is not really successful. However, as a psychological horror film, it is not without its merits, and hopefully its strong points indicate better things to come from Holcombe and his collaborators.
You’re Next (2011)
Originally published on Film Monthly 13 January 2014
Adam Wingard’s You’re Next was a huge hit on the festival circuit in 2011 when it was picked up for distribution for Lionsgate, who promptly confused hardcore horror fans anxiously awaiting the film by announcing an August 2013 release date. As far as inexplicable movie studio maneuvers go, this is about as confounding as they get. However, maybe Lionsgate was just waiting for the Saw franchise to close up shop and the new Halloween box-office king Paranormal Activity to fall off. If that was the plan, they nailed it. This is the first year since 2008 that the Fall horror schedule is clear of a Paranormal Activity entry, seemingly leaving the door wide open for something new. And even after sitting on the shelf for two years, You’re Next certainly feels like something new: a funny, intense horror film that takes the time to create interesting characters and relationships between them. And then lets most of them get massacred in graphic and sometimes novel ways.
Paul (Rob Moran) and Aubrey (Barbara Crampton) are celebrating their 35th wedding anniversary by inviting all of their children to their remote country home. Crispian (AJ Bowen), a professor, and his young girlfriend Erin (Sharni Vinson) arrive early, followed the next day by the rest of the siblings and their significant others: smug Drake (Joe Swanberg) and Kelly (Sarah Myers), youngest son Felix (Nicholas Tucci) and his bored girlfriend Zee (Wendy Glenn), and their sister Aimee (Amy Seimetz) and her documentary filmmaker boyfriend Tariq (Ti West). It doesn’t take long for Drake’s baiting of Crispian to explode into an all-out war at the dinner table, although that tiff is quickly forgotten when one of the guests gets an arrow through the forehead and the whole family finds themselves hitting the floor to avoid a barrage of arrows coming through the dining room windows.
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