Rocky (Jane Levy) has virtually made a career out of theft with her boyfriend Money (Daniel Zovatto) and their friend Alex (Dylan Minnette). Money gets a line on a potential big score that Rocky could use to get her and her little sister out of Detroit and their strung-out mother’s home: a blind man (Stephen Lang) who may have hundreds of thousands of dollars squirreled away somewhere inside his isolated home. It seems like an easy job, but what they don’t know is that the Blind Man is former military, highly trained and extremely dangerous with or without his eyesight. Their plan rapidly goes sideways, the thieves are trapped inside the house, and the hunt is on. Don’t Breathe is a solid thriller that has one absolutely jaw-dropping sequence—a basement chase shot completely in the dark with super low-light cameras—that very nearly makes the whole movie worth watching on its own. Levy is a compelling lead, once again teaming up with Evil Dead director Fede Alvarez, and her and Lang give their characters more weight than they probably even need. What starts off as a straightforward thrill ride moves into some jarringly disturbing territory, though, and when the Blind Man’s motives are unveiled the movie trades in a lot of its unpretentious exploitation charm for something much sleazier. Until that point, Don’t Breathe is a solidly built, stylish thriller that more than anything makes me look forward to whatever Alvarez does next.
Festival Report: Chicago Underground Film Festival 2016
Originally published 6 June 2016
The 2016 Chicago Underground Film Festival was held at the Logan Theatre from June 1-5. This year’s schedule included 11 features and over 100 shorts, including special retrospective programs of work by Tony Conrad and Luther Price. The following is Daily Grindhouse’s coverage of the feature films at the festival in order of screening.
June 1, 2016
Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present (USA, dir. Tyler Hubby)
The opening film of this year’s Chicago Underground Film Festival was something of a bittersweet affair. This was the world premiere of Tyler Hubby’s documentary on Tony Conrad, and Conrad was scheduled to appear at the festival as a special guest and receive the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Unfortunately, he passed away in April of this year. His widow, Paige Sarlin, accepted the award on Conrad’s behalf. It’s hard to imagine a better tribute to Tony Conrad than Tyler Hubby’s film, which features a lot of footage of Conrad talking candidly about his life and his work. Conrad had an infectious sense of mischief and a disdain for any kind of authority, and just spending time listening to him talk is a joy. Packed with photos, recordings, and film and video clips of his work from the 60s to the 2000s as well as interviews with some of Conrad’s collaborators and fans (including Jim O’Rourke and Moby), Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present does an admirable job of compressing a massively important and influential career into a feature-length documentary without feeling rushed. It’s tough to imagine watching this film and not feeling immediately compelled to dive into Tony Conrad’s work.
June 2, 2016
The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (UK, dir. Ben Rivers)
Ben Rivers’s previous feature, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, made a lot of waves on the festival circuit a few years ago. Co-directed with Ben Russell, that film blurred the lines between documentary and narrative, and Rivers’s follow-up does the same. The opening section of The Sky Trembles follows director Oliver Laxe (playing himself) as he shoots his feature film Mimosas in Morocco. Rivers keeps his distance and observes patiently, but when Laxe strikes off on his own the film transitions from filmmaking documentary to something completely different. As in Darkness, there is no shortage of breathtaking imagery in The Sky Trembles—this is one of the two films at the festival shot on 35mm—but ultimately it is not as satisfying a viewing experience. Still, the film’s powerful atmosphere is undeniable.
The Love Witch (USA, dir. Anna Biller)
It’s been nearly a decade since Anna Biller’s debut feature Viva, but the results speak for themselves. The Love Witch is an astonishing feature, shot and edited on 35mm, that displays once again Biller’s staggering talents. Elaine (Samantha Robinson) moves to a small town after the death of her ex-husband Jerry (Stephen Wozniak). Elaine killed Jerry, possibly accidentally, and is now obsessed with finding the perfect man using love magick. Her approach has some unintended side effects, though, including death, and soon the bodies begin to pile up. Anna Biller not only wrote, directed, and edited the film but designed the costumes and sets as well as composed songs for it. Her obsessive attention to 70s period detail is unparalleled, as well as her fluency in the visual language of exploitation films of that era: if you watched almost any given stretch of the film and didn’t know any better, you would absolutely believe it was made in the early 70s. This time, though, Biller has set the film in present day, using the idealized world of garish wallpaper, lurid paintings, lush soundtrack, and gorgeous costumes as a way of showing how Elaine sees the world. It’s a choice that adds even more depth to her trademark style of using signifiers of low-budget exploitation history to explore concerns about gender roles in modern society. It also happens to be a hell of a lot of fun. This is easily one of the best films of the year so far.
June 3, 2016
Grace Period (USA, dir. Caroline Key & Kim KyungMook)
New York-based filmmaker Caroline Key’s debut feature-length documentary Grace Period is a portrait of the women who worked in the Yeongdeungpo brothels in Seoul, South Korea. Following the passage of a sex trade law in 2004 and encroaching gentrification from corporate and retail interests, police and government had been making life progressively more difficult for the women working in Yeongdeungpo. Grace Period combines interviews with the women with footage shot in the brothels of those spaces minus their inhabitants. This gives the viewer an intimate portrait of these women without showing them on camera, although we do see many of them in footage they shot themselves of some of their street protests in 2011. When the women do appear in Key’s footage, they appear as black silhouettes against the bright colors of their rooms open to the street. Key and her co-director Kim KyungMook have created an elegant, heartbreaking portrait of a community of women on the fringes of society who find themselves with dwindling options in the face of oppression.
Director’s Commentary: Terror of Frankenstein (USA, dir. Tim Kirk)
Tim Kirk was a producer on Rodney Ascher’s documentaries Room 237 (about people obsessed with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, made entirely with clips from other films set to voiceover interviews) and The Nightmare (on sleep paralysis, which featured re-enactments of its participants’ experiences staged like a deconstructionist theater piece), so it makes sense that his feature directorial debut is built on another ambitiously bizarre concept. Taking Terror of Frankenstein, a real 1977 Swedish film, Kirk and co-writer Jay Kirk have created a lengthy fake history leading to the production of the film and its subsequent infamy after a horrific tragedy sparked morbid interest in audiences. The film is presented as a director’s commentary between the film’s director Gavin Merrill (Clu Gulager) and writer David Falks (Zack Norman) while the actual film plays out in its entirety from what looks like a bleary VHS transfer. It starts out innocuously enough, with Merrill trying to pry stories out of Falks as he talks about the film’s cult of “Frankheads” and midnight screenings of the film, but talk soon turns to the sinister methods they used to get actors into character and other problems both personal and professional happening behind the scenes. There are moments of bleak humor through Director’s Commentary, but the rhythm of the commentary itself hews closer to a radio drama than an actual filmmaker commentary track. This would probably work very well in a live environment with the actors in front of the audience, but as a recorded artifact, the theatrical nature of the dialogue often undermines the illusion of authenticity. It’s another fascinating concept from Kirk and Ascher (who acted as producer and editor here), but despite fine work from its cast, a film version may ironi
cally have been the wrong medium for it.
June 4, 2016
Focus on Infinity (Austria/USA, dir. Joerg Burger)
Director Joerg Burger’s Focus on Infinity has been playing film festivals around the world since 2014, but curiously has hardly been seen in the States. That might be because it’s something of a hard sell: it’s an appropriately meditative look at people from all over the world asking big questions about the nature of human existence by looking out into space and into the realm of the subatomic. It’s gorgeously shot, with some truly amazing cinematography (Burger has acted as a director of photography on almost two dozen films) and a carefully designed soundtrack that blurs the line between sounds captured on location and abstract musical pieces composed for the film. The interview subjects are interesting and wildly varied, and all offer intriguing observations on their areas of research and thinking. Focus on Infinity is a beautiful, refined audiovisual experience that gives a tantalizingly brief look at people working in places where science and faith are in close approximation, and it offers viewers plenty to chew on after it’s over.
Excursions (USA, dir. Daniel Martinico)
Two couples meet at a remote house in the woods for a few days of dinner, drinking, party games, and a lot more in Daniel Martinico’s Excursions. The two men and two women who make up the couples are the only people ever seen on screen, and the entire film takes place in and around the house, giving it a claustrophobic atmosphere that’s a little uncomfortable even before the weirder stuff gets started. Martinico approaches the action here with intricate sound design and a rigidly external focus: the audience only knows what these characters are thinking and feeling through what they’re saying and how they behave, even when things go decidedly south in the final stretch. This approach is intriguing, but it’s also somewhat (unintentionally?) comical. Excursions feels like the kind of film that would have been made totally straight-faced in the late 60s or early 70s, but the same approach in a modern film feels strangely anachronistic. It’s also tough to watch without thinking Weird Stuff White People Do would be a perfectly acceptable alternate title.
Pastor Paul (USA, dir. Jules David Bartkowski)
Benjamin (writer/director Jules David Bartkowski) is an American mathematician in Africa studying the rhythms of different region’s drumming styles when he is asked to act in a movie by Kubolor (Wanlov Kubolor, one half of the FOKN Bois and co-star of the Coz Ov Moni films). Somewhat befuddled, Benjamin agrees, but on the set he is seemingly struck with a seizure and speaks in tongues. Following this he goes about his business and talks to people in local villages for his studies, but during a late night at a drum circle he has another episode and wakes up the next morning in an abandoned house. Will Benjamin be able to rid himself of this strange spiritual malady in time for the movie premiere? Pastor Paul is a fun, loose comedy shot in Nigeria and Ghana and featuring actors and filmmakers from those countries’ film industries. Bartkowski cuts a humorously out-of-place figure with his lanky figure and light hair, underlined by the all-white suit he is asked to wear as a costume for the movie in which he accidentally stars. Everyone on screen looks like they’re having a blast, and that good-natured charm makes Pastor Paul a standout independent comedy.
June 5, 2016
Deprogrammed (USA/Canada, dir. Mia Donovan)
In 2011, documentary filmmaker Mia Donovan met with her stepbrother Matthew for the first time in 18 years. In the early 1990s, Matthew’s father had hired Ted Patrick to “deprogram” Matthew, who was listening to heavy metal and acting out. The process left Matthew traumatized. Donovan began to investigate the history of “deprogramming” and discovered that Patrick was in fact the inventor of the concept, having began work in the early 1970s when parents all over the country feared their children were being brainwashed by cults. Deprogrammed traces the history of Patrick and his process, interviewing not only Matthew and Ted Patrick himself but a number of others who Patrick “deprogrammed” in his decades-long career and some of his fellow “cult experts.” Donovan takes a remarkably objective look at Patrick and his work, which raise many troubling questions that have no simple answers. While his methods were obviously questionable and his process caused irreparable harm to many people, it’s also clear that some of his “patients” had better lives as a result of deprogramming. Donovan’s film takes an in-depth and personal look at a very strange time in recent history, a time in which the generation gap seemed to some people more like an actual war than just some misunderstanding between parents and children.
Booger Red (USA, dir. Berndt Mader)
Alcoholic Austin journalist Onur Tukel (Onur Tukel) is given a challenging assignment by his editor: investigating the case of what was alleged to be the largest child sex ring in Texas history. Before he leaves, he gets a surprise visit from Marija (Marija Karan), his brother’s widow. She has come from Serbia to visit him and insists on going along. Once he arrives in the town of Mineola where the offenses supposedly took place, Tukel meets and interviews a number of locals who were involved in the case, many of them actually playing themselves. As Tukel and Marija become more involved in the case—which comes to increasingly look like an elaborate political maneuver made at the expense of several poor, uneducated people who could not defend themselves—Tukel is forced to face a dark incident in his own childhood. Booger Red is an unusual hybrid of documentary and fiction, and its closest relative is probably Richard Linklater’s Bernie. However, instead of re-enacting the story, director Berndt Mader and co-writer Johnny McAllister create a fictional narrative that plays in parallel with the interviews. Tukel plays a fictional version of himself but interviews people who were actually involved in the case, including one who remains in prison despite the existence of substantial evidence the man did nothing wrong. It’s an intriguing approach, but the fictional companion story feels superfluous and sometimes uncomfortably exploitative. Despite fine work from Tukel and Karan as both actors and interviewers, Booger Red can never quite get past the fact that the story at its center and the people who were affected by its aftermath deserve to have their stories told more comprehensively.
Note: Booger Red won the CUFF Audience Award.
The Alchemist Cookbook (USA, dir. Joel Potrykus)
Sean (Ty Hickson) is holed up in a tiny trailer deep in the woods with his cat Kaspar. He’s working on something that requires precise mixtures of chemicals and speaking incantations. Occasionally his cousin Cortez (Amari Cheatom) drops by with supplies, but otherwise Sean is alone in the forest with Kaspar and something sinister and powerful. And one incredibly creepy opossum. Joel Potrykus’s follow-up to 2014’s Buzzard is another blue-collar horror show, but with a much different approach and tone. It’s much quieter and less urgent, taking its time establishing a claustrophobic atmosphere and its lead character’s isolation. The long periods of quiet are punctuated with bursts of supernatural dread or surprisingly goofy humor. One scene in particular using cat food as a central prop is flat-out hilarious, and Potrykus uses these breaks in tension expertly to build toward a powerful finale. Hickson is a compelling lead, which is important since large chunks of the film are without dialogue. The end of the film is a little jarring and abrupt after all that comes before it, but that’s a minor nitpick. The Alchemist Cookbook confirms Potrykus as a unique voice in independent cinema.
Festival Report: 2016 Boston Underground Film Festival
Originally published 16 May 2016
This year’s Boston Underground Film Festival took place from March 23rd to the 27th in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the historic Brattle Theater. In addition to numerous shorts, the 2016 festival had a fantastic slate of feature films. Daily Grindhouse takes a look at 10 features that screened at the festival that will likely be making waves throughout the year.
The Lure (Poland, dir. Agnieszka Smoczynska)
The opening film of the festival was Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s debut feature Corki Dancingu (aka The Lure). The film made a spla
sh — pun intended? — when it screened at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and it’s not hard to see why. To say that the film is “unique” is a severe understatement: It’s a musical about man-eating mermaids who look like teenage girls getting a gig singing backup with a low-rent bar band in the early 1980s. It’s actually even weirder than it sounds, but eventually that works against it. The first hour or so is breathtakingly off-kilter, packed with both low-key songs and one huge dance number that could have been pulled from a big-budget Bollywood movie. It’s somewhat disappointing when the plot meanders off into a number of directions without any real payoff in its final act. Still, despite its unsatisfying finale, The Lure is unlike anything else out there and well worth a look and proves that Smoczynska is definitely a talent to watch.
Cash Only (USA, dir. Malik Bader)
Elvis (Nickola Shreli), a Detroit landlord, is up against the wall. He has a number of debts to parties both legal and otherwise and a shrinking window in which to pay them. A previous scheme involving arson not only didn’t pay off, but ended with tragic results that have caused Elvis to spiral into depression. He’s barely keeping it together for his daughter, but when one of his tenants who is months behind on her rent leaves a bag of cash in her apartment, he sees a chance to turn it around. Unfortunately for Elvis, nothing is ever that easy. Cash Only is a solid crime drama with an unusual setting, taking place among Detroit’s Albanian community. Shreli, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, leads a compelling cast that give the film a strong emotional center. It falters a little in its final moments, but overall director Malik Bader keeps the pace brisk and the tension high, making this a memorable thriller.
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