Sightseers was directed by Ben Wheatley, a sort of UK Tarantino who arrived on the scene with his Pulp-Fiction-meets-Wicker-Man hybrid called Kill List. But Sightseers is not a Wheatley movie. He just sort of ably corrals it. From start to finish, Sightseers belongs to the tremendous Alice Lowe. You might recognize Lowe as the female quarter of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, gamely holding her own alongside Matthew Holness, Matt Berry, and Richard Ayoade. Her comedic timing is impeccable. In Sightseers, she alternately beams and sulks, murderous, adoring, confused, unconcerned, seething, idiotically oblivious. Lowe’s performance drives this movie into its strange crannies. She can accomplish with a forlorn glance what it took Will Farrell an entire career to achieve and squander.
Sightseers is the creation of Lowe and an actor named Steve Oram. Over the years, they developed these characters from a series of sketches about an English couple traveling England to see the sights, doing inappropriate things along the way. This distillation of those characters is a masterpiece of black humor, mean-spirited and nasty, cruel and uncompromising, uniquely English and drab. It knows enough to be understated. Some of the best moments are Lowe and Oram just riffing with each other. She licks a cave. He tries to explain pictures he didn’t even take. It’s so goddamn precious and mundane in the bits between the mayhem, the vulgarity, and the sociopathic rampages. It’s the opposite of True Romance or Something Wild. True Prosaic. Something Mild. Bonnie and Clyde as unsexy mousy Brits without anything better to do.
But most importantly, it knows when to go over the top without flying off the handle completely, and it knows how to do it smartly rather than gratuitously. It has a respectable sense of the absurd. “I’ve never hurt an innocent person before,” Lowe muses after a nasty accident. “He’s not a person, he’s a Daily Mail reader,” Oram replies without any hint of a wink. English, mean, and smart.
Sightseers is out on DVD today. Support Qt3 by watching it on Amazon.com or watch it instantly on Netflix.
In 1976, a Spanish director named Narciso Serrador made a movie called Who Can Kill A Child?, but with the words in Spanish. It opens with ten minutes of newsreel footage about the atrocities visited on children in the 20th century, from the Holocaust, to starvation in Africa, to the then ongoing conflicts in Southeast Asia. ‘What the heck kind of movie is this?,’ you might wonder. Then the movie proper starts and you’re watching a moody mystery/horror thriller about an English couple vacationing in Spain who happens upon a mysteriously depopulated island. It turns out the children have slaughtered all the adults. Basically, a Children of the Corn before there were any Children of the Corn.
So what was the point of all that newsreel footage? Serrador suggests that these homicidal children are an evolutionary response to the atrocities of the modern era. Children suffer the worst during war, famine, and upheaval. So the children on this island have developed a preemptive homicidal tendency as a survival measure. And because people who don’t commit atrocities have a built-in reluctance to kill children — as per the title of a movie — the children can get away with it. The movie ends with the English couple successfully dispatched (the pregnant wife is actually killed from within by her unborn baby). The children appropriate a Coast Guard boat and sail to the mainland to infect the children there. It’s the end of the world! Roll credits.
After the jump, it’s been long enough! Let’s remake this thing! Continue reading →
The significance of the title of Frances Ha is arguably a spoiler because of when it’s revealed. It’s a bit like how Greenberg, director Noah Baumbach’s last movie and similarly a showcase for Greta Gerwig’s gangly charm, ended with the simple insight of the line, “This is you”. What a way to close out a movie.
Frances Ha might seem at first like the hip stylings of twentysomethings in New York City. But it would be a mistake to lump this movie in with the precociousness of Lena Dunham’s Girls. Because for all the emotional honesty and stylized naturalism in Girls, it’s still a neatly packaged weekly show arranged into seasonal arcs, neatly divvied up among its cannily arranged cast. Frances Ha is also emotionally honest and stylishly naturalistic, but it’s a far more focused story about the pain of transitioning into adulthood at a different rate from your friends. It’s about not quite being able to move into your place in the world. It has bite. It’s almost never played for laughs, although it’s certainly funny. Sometimes cruelly so.
Baumbach’s fondness for New York is in full force, shot in lovely black-and-white. Also, it’s masterfully edited as a series of flashes about the process of day to day life over the weeks and months. It even jumps nonchalantly to a whole other country. If there’s one problem — and this is a great problem for a movie to have — it’s that Gerwig is so striking in black and white. She has the elegance of Ingrid Bergman, but with an amazing unselfconscious expressiveness. It can be hard to accept her as a down-on-her-luck twentysomething. Isn’t the world kinder to people this luminous?
Watch Frances Ha on Amazon.com to support Qt3. Or just go ahead and get this Criterion Collection Blu-ray with a handful of interviews.
If you thought Prometheus would have been better with a small budget, Last Days on Mars is the movie for you. Mars here is played by Jordan, which doesn’t look much different from Arizona. The landscapes look as if there might be a 7-11 if you just panned the camera a few degrees to the right. As a story, this goes exactly where you think it’s going to go (check out Europa Report for a space adventure with a real sense of mystery). At times, Last Days on Mars teases at a space horror romp on par with a Dead Space videogame, but it doesn’t have the stomach or R-rating for anything too visceral. So there’s a lot of running away from stuff, a lot of yelling about “what are we going to do?”, a lot of crawling through the inexplicable tunnels under this pre-fab Mars base, and a lot of supposedly smart astronauts doing stupid things to draw out the plot.
What’s most horrific is that it features a few actors who are good enough to know better. Sure, I get that Liev Schreiber, star of the Omen remake, would agree to phone in a laconic leading man performance. But how do you explain Elias Koteas, Olivia Williams, and Johnny Harris (see the brilliant London to Brighton and the middling Welcome to the Punch if you need any convincing about Harris)? Oh my. The production design is moderately nifty, if not awfully spacious. And I sure do like their Mars trucks. But it’s no Moon. And it’s ultimately a pretty pointless exercise in poorly done horror. Does Mars really need zombies?
Last Days on Mars is available now for video on demand. Watch it on Amazon.com to support Qt3.
Tom: Some thing are better left buried. For instance, your recollection of Near Dark as a stylish contemporary Western-themed vampire adventure directed by action auteur Kathryn Bigelow. If that’s how you remember it, hold that thought and watch something else instead.
After the jump, at least they don’t sparkle. Continue reading →
Chris: In a clear and steady hand, Harry Angel writes the name and adds a question mark. He underlines it twice. Shortly after, Angel meets the man who belongs to the name. A lawyer pronounces the man’s name clearly, twice even. There’s no mistaking the cadence of the first and last name, and we’ll hear it again before long. The man has a strange appearance. There’s a familiar symbol on his ring. He speaks bemusedly of contracts and collateral. “I have a feeling we’ve met before.” Within 10 minutes we’ve figured out who the man is and we have a good idea of who the detective might be, and what their relationship to one another is.
After the jump, Mephistopheles is such a mouthful in Manhattan. Continue reading →
Chris: It’s all here, really. In 30 minutes, Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist script creates the archetype for anyone wanting to follow him along with making horror films in suburban settings for the modern age. He establishes the normal familiarity of the setting, the relatability of the characters, and the mundanity that’s part and parcel of a middle-class suburban family and neighborhood. And then like a little kid making sandcastles on the beach, he gleefully, almost joyfully kicks it all over by introducing menacing evil spirits from beyond the grave.
But, after the jump, just how menacing are they? Continue reading →
Tom: The Thing was the pinnacle of horror special effects before CG came along. Even if your latter days eyes can’t see past the latex and syrup, there’s no denying the imagination that went into these effects. I’ve seen things in The Thing that I have never seen before or since, except for when they’re aping The Thing. Never were the words “you have got to be fucking kidding” so appropriate.
After the jump, John Carpenter is not kidding. Continue reading →
Tom: This is goofball Larry Cohen’s early New York guerrilla filmmaking at his best (i.e. it’s better than God Told Me To). Not to say Q is good filmmaking. It’s not. I can’t help but guffaw at the wings drawn over the helicopter shadow as this movie’s excuse for special effect. But Q has something unique. It has an absolutely fascinating performance by Michael Moriarity, who demonstrates that when an actor is really invested in a role, he can transcend writing, direction, and claymation. I would love to adapt Q as a stage play. I promise I am not joking about that, because at the heart of this movie is the stuff of good drama: a character making decisions. All it needs is an actor as talented and committed as Moriarty.
After the jump, that’s one hell of an omelet. Continue reading →
Tom: Could this be the last great werewolf movie? Or even the last non-awful werewolf movie? Because since then, I can’t think of any decent werewolf movies. I can, however, think of some real howlers (get it?). Jack Nicholson peeing on James Spader’s shoes in Mike Nichols’ Wolf. CG Anthony Hopkins dog vs. CG Benecio del Toro dog in a CG burning building at the end of The Wolfman. Lichens in the Underworld series. Taylor Lautner.
Chris: It’s literally been 20 years since I’ve seen it, but isn’t there some sort of widespread underground affection for The Howling? I saw that before I was old enough to really appreciate anything other than the coolness of werewolves ripping people up. Does that movie pre-date this? I’m having trouble thinking of any werewolf movies before or after this one I’d rather see. I think this could be the only great werewolf movie.
After the jump, have you ever talked to a corpse before? Continue reading →
Chris: The late 1970s and early 1980s gave us a slew of what I call, for lack of a better term, lunkheaded ghost movies. The most famous example is The Amityville Horror (which was based in turn on a lunkheaded ghost book), but there were others. The Changeling falls squarely into that category, but has ambition to transcend it. It probably doesn’t. As an effectively creepy haunted house movie it succeeds, but don’t spend too much time analyzing it. It is the Citizen Kane (or at least How Green Was My Valley) of lunkheaded ghost movies.
After the jump, rosebud was a medallion! Continue reading →
Tom: Well this was an unexpected delight. Unexpected because I haven’t seen The Shining in probably over ten years. Probably more. Not since I was old enough to appreciate it. And a delight not because I think it’s a good movie. I kind of don’t. It’s just as stilted and occasionally overblown (“Here’s Johnny!”) as I remembered. But it was a delight because I had no recollection that The Shining is about what it’s about. I feel like I’ve discovered something thrilling that was there all along, like finding a twenty dollar bill in a pair of jeans you’ve put through the wash.
After the jump, I’m not going to hurt you, Wendy. Continue reading →
Chris: By 1979 there was no bigger name in horror in any media than Stephen King. His run of work in that era–The Stand, The Shining, and a short fiction collection–made him a household name. The film version of his first novel, Carrie, had been a tremendous success with critics and at the box office, and so adapting more of his work for the screen was a no-brainer.
One of the problems with doing that–setting aside creative issues–was the sheer length of King’s other works of that era. As a novel, Carrie comes in at under 200 pages, and not a lot happens between a couple of big events. King’s later works would nearly quadruple that word count, making adapting for the screen a problem for the studios. They’d be required to either significantly adapt the work for the screen, or make 3 hour films. With Salem’s Lot, the first post-Carrie attempt to film King, they tried that latter approach, turning it into a two-part miniseries for CBS.
After the jump, how’d that work out? Continue reading →
Tom: As most horror movies progress, they lose their mystery and therefore their impact. The exposition bubbles up and molds itself precisely into whatever template the movie is using. Oh, it’s aliens, radiation, the devil, a ghost, etc. Now I see. Phantasm is a movie without a “now I see” moment. Even the ultimate reveal in the antique shop is more of a “so…uh?” moment than a “now I see moment”. This sort of batshit absurd senseless implausibility is a precious commodity.
After the jump, let me break it down for you. Continue reading →
Tom: Depending on how much of a zombie purist you are, you can make the case that Invasion of the Body Snatcher is not really a zombie movie. But it belongs in the discussion. You can see the lines of continuity and the cross-pollination. The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956 was an allegory about communism, very much in keeping with Who Goes There, which would turn into The Thing (the John Carpenter one, not so much the James Arness as a giant carrot one). The original Invasion is creepy, but entirely clean and antiseptic. Plus, we prevail, as we were wont to do in the 50s. But the idea is that the people we know and love have been taken over. They’re still themselves, but different, and ultimately hostile to our way of life.
Then along comes Last Man on Earth (based on a 1954 book), which has your friends and neighbors coming out at night and trying to break into your house en masse, but with a certain amount of lethargy, as if they know they’ll get in eventually and there’s really no hurry. They were called “vampires” in that movie, and they would call out to you by name, asking you to come outside. Vincent Price would venture out by day to hunt them. The scenes of night falling and the zombies — err, I mean, vampires — surrounding the barricaded house will look instantly familiar. Four years later, with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, George Romero will basically codify zombies as we know them. They’ll be slow and lethargic, in no particularly hurry, but they won’t talk.
After the jump, the next shambling step. Continue reading →
