Michael J. Bassett might be the new Paul W.S. Anderson when it comes to translating videogaming absurdity into cinematic silliness. So if you’re willing to sit through a Resident Evil movie, there’s no reason not to sit through the latest Silent Hill movie. Bassett is an ideal man for the job, considering his Solomon Kane is another one of the best worst things you can see all week. Say what you will about the guy’s movies, but he’s got style and he knows how to gather watchable actors. This Silent Hill features Carrie-Anne Moss as Edgar Winters, Malcolm McDowell as a really lame boss fight, Sean Bean sitting out most of the action, Martin Donovan as a detective you’ll forget was in the movie before it’s over, and Michelle Williams look-a-like Adelaide Clemens showing the sort of commitment that will serve her better in her small role in The Great Gatsby and in her kick-ass turn in Versus director Ryuhei Kitamura’s surprisingly good No One Lives.
Of course, you don’t come to Silent Hill for the human players. Revelation does an admirable job collecting a bunch of cool sets and weird creatures, all loosely connected by what might be a story. Pyramid Head moonlights variously as a carny, a prison warden with an effective solution for grabby inmates, and even a Big Daddy. The nurses are disturbingly erotic in a way that I’m not sure I noticed playing the videogames. And the movie’s counterpart to Silent Hill 2’s disturbing mannequin rape is a wonderfully creepy introduction to a new creature as memorable as anything from the games. What sense does it make? What story does it tell? What do we find out about the town itself? What motivates the characters? Forget it, Tom. It’s Silent Hill.
Silent Hill: Revelation is on VOD, Blu-Ray, DVD, and Netflix.
Ever wonder what kind of horror movie Mark Duplass would write? Frankly, me either. But the answer to that question is Black Rock, directed by and starring Katie Aselton, who has worked with Duplass in quirky indie comedy fare like The League and Puffy Chair.
It opens with — stop me if you’ve heard this one — three women going camping. They drive a little boat out to an island utterly devoid of anything resembling scenery or likely camping spots. This being a horror movie, there are bad men out here. When it comes time to toughen up and survive, the scenes play out like acting workshop exercises. “Okay ladies, in this scene, you’re a football team getting psyched for the big game. Go!” They even smack each other on the head to show they’re serious. But this stuff is practically Brando compared to the villain, a pale willowy nerd mistakenly cast as a ruthless war-hardened psycho.
The most notable thing about Black Rock is its take on nudity. Plenty of horror movies include pointlessly titillating nudity. It goes with the territory. Black Rock takes a briefly courageous approach, but quickly turns timid. The actresses put their clothes back on and you’re back to watching a typical horror movie. It all ends in a ridiculous rough-and-tumble finale with all the brutality of a pillow fight, but with bad bruise make-up and a little fake blood.
Black Rock is available on video on demand. Support Qt3 by watching it on Amazon.com.
You can usually tell early on when a no-budget movie is going to be a waste of time. It’s clear early on this isn’t the case with Resolution, which has a deliciously creepy slow-burn script, a confident style by co-directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, and two appealing leads. Vinny Curran is a gloriously bearded redneck junkie and Peter Cilella is the friend who single-handedly conducts his intervention. Curran has the showier role and he’s in over his head at times. But Cilella is particularly good as the exasperated straight man, with all of Greg Kinnear’s appeal and none of the smirk. And most importantly, they’ve got the kind of chemistry to make what they’re doing believable.
The intervention angle is mostly a set-up to get these two guys to linger for a few day in one of those cabins in the woods that you might see in movies such as, well, The Cabin in the Woods. To imply there’s anything meta going on could be a spoiler. Suffice to say Justin Benson’s script is no stranger to Cache, one of Michael Haneke’s finest, most intricate, and most infuriatingly elusive movies. Resolution manages to do far more with things that go bump against the camera than any mere special effects. And once the ending rolls around, there’s no denying this is a movie that has earned its title.
And hey, look, they even got Bill Oberst Jr.!
Resolution is available for video on demand. Support Qt3 by watching it on Amazon.com.
One of the most insidious formulas for a horror movie is to let you hang out for a while with people you get to know and like, and to then do terrible things to them. Wolf Creek and Black Water, for instance, are examples of horror movies in which nothing horrific happens for a long time and the movie is all the better for it.
The latest crop of bad horror movies — many of them found footage — gets this all wrong by forcing you to sit for a long time with unlikable characters played by bad actors. By the time anything horrible happens, you couldn’t care less. In Aftershock, mostly forgettable bad things happen to an unlikable bunch of snotty Chileans with a couple of foreigners sprinkled into the mix, including Eli Roth, who perfected bad things happening to bad characters to bad effect in his wretched Hostel series.
Roth didn’t direct Aftershock, but you’d never know considering what artless trash it is. It consists of a half hour of three dude hitting on chicks in nightclubs. Kill me now. Eventually, a low budget earthquake happens, a funicular crashes but they didn’t have the budget to show it, local hires playing escaped prisoners tastefully rape one of the actresses and burn Roth alive with CG fire, the heroine and a surprise bad guy flop around contentiously in a poorly lit cave, and then a really chintzy CG tsunami shows up for the final shot. Aftershock is ultimately like one of those cheaply made “bad weather” Sci Fi Channel movies, but with an R-rating made pointless by the fact that the director was clearly influenced by either Roth’s Hostel movies or the sorts of crass 70s exploitation horror that Dimension Films would never let him shoot.
Aftershock is available for video on demand. Not that you should care.
Kiss of the Damned has a promising pedigree. The director, Xan Cassavetes, is the daughter of John Cassavetes, so it’s no surprise that she gets how to do an homage to movies from the 70s. In this case, Italian horror. But she’s also the daughter of Gena Rowlands, so you’d think she’d know the importance of casting good actresses, particularly in a movie about three female vampires.
Unfortunately, this occasionally intriguing homage can’t bear up under the weight of its three awkward performances. It opens promisingly enough with Josephine de la Baume, unconventionally lovely in the way that people are lovely in movies made 40 years ago, as a vampire who reluctantly falls in love because sometimes guys are just so darn persistent. There’s enough style and sexual heat in these early scenes that you might think you’re in for an adult version of Twilight (pictured). Sounds good! Remember that scene in Coppola’s Dracula movie when all the naked vampire chicks writhe invitingly around Keanu Reeves? I sure do.
But then Roxane Mesquida shows up as the bad sister vampire. In the surreal horror movie Rubber, her nearly impenetrable accent lent a touch of hilarity, particularly when she tried to coax the killer out of a house by voicing a booby-trapped mannequin. But here her accent just makes her hard to understand. I suppose bad English in an English-language movie is another way to represent the exotic, timeless, and worldly quality of a vampire.
Finally, there’s Anna Mouglalis as the mother figure standing between the sisters. Mouglalis has a long list of credits, which includes playing Coco Chanel to Mads Mikkelsen’s Igor Stravinsky. But by the time she’s called in to lend some gravity to these squabbling vampire sisters, Kiss of the Damned has long since left the realm of the sexy and stylish and wandered into a maze of camp and bad acting. I suppose it is an adult version of Twilight after all.
Kiss of the Damned is available to watch instantly at Amazon.com.
It’s been nearly ten years since Shane Carruth’s Primer, an intriguing first-time director project with a smart spare style, a cold dispassionate edge, and hardly a performance worth remembering. But Carruth’s Upstream Color is so much more — I don’t intend this to sound as patronizing as it’s going to sound — mature than Primer. It has real emotional weight underneath the concept, where Primer was all concept.
A lot of the credit goes to the heartbreakingly expressive Amy Seimetz. Her frail intensity similarly drives a horror movie called A Horrible Way to Die. Carruth knows enough to let the movie linger on her, on her wonder, on her wounded confusion, on how she’s looking at whatever she’s looking at. The payoff is a scene in which she shifts her gaze up a few degrees. You can see it coming, you know it’s going to happen, but watching her finally fix the deep black of her gaze is a staggering moment. Literally. God Himself cannot bear to look back.
Upstream Color is rich with theme, meaning, and oblique references that might not bubble up until long after you’ve left the theater. When Moses met God on Sinai, he couldn’t look at God’s face. Upstream Color opens with a similar moment, and culminates with the aforementioned shift in gaze, but this is no mere movie about religion. In Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire, the angels looked on sadly, forlornly, one of them wanting desperately to be seen. In Upstream Color, the angel is no angel, and he lives in the DNA of a worm instead of atop the Victory Column in Berlin. Upstream Color, which is like Wings of Desire in that it’s about empathy, presents identity theft as a metaphor for evolution. Or is it the other way around? It’s about the terrible price living creatures pay for empathy, or the power of memory at a cellular level (hi, Altered States!), or how consciousness is unmoored from time and space. I sound like I just dropped acid and watched 2001 for the first time with my friends, and now we’re holding forth in someone’s dorm room, convinced we’re all smarter for it. But that’s the level at which Upstream Color works, and it works wonderfully if you’re willing to meet it on those terms. I don’t mean dropping acid. But I do mean whatever your counterpart is to holding forth in someone’s dorm room. For instance, writing up a short review like this.
Too few directors take the chances Carruth has taken here. His creative vision, which goes well beyond directing into editing, music, stunning cinematography, and even how his acting creates a place for Seimetz to curl up, deserves the freedom he affords himself. This is a uniquely languid movie, and potentially confusing, and not at all neat. People who came because they saw the trailer might get up and leave and later feel right at home in Oblivion, or maybe even the pedestrian film-school anime-fan trippiness of Looper. Upstream Color, the opposite of a crowd pleaser, is what would happen if Terence Malick’s Tree of Life was a genre movie instead of his usual meditation on the meaning of life. I’m inclined to put Upstream Color in the same bio-punk category as Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral. I don’t pretend to know much science fiction beyond movies, but if young directors like Carruth, Cronenberg, Duncan Jones, and Neill Blomkamp keep doing what they’re doing with the genre, I might have to apply for a sci-fi fan card.
Upstream Color is in limited release and will be available for video on demand May 7th.
When you talk about Moon, there’s no reason to point out that Duncan Jones is David Bowie’s son. But when you talk about Antiviral, you can’t very well not point out that Brandon Cronenberg is David Cronenberg’s son. The younger Cronenberg channels his father’s body dysmorphia with scalpel precision, stark insight, and the same dreamy malaise of David Cronenberg’s best movies.
The subject of Antiviral is celebrity obsession, but not in the obvious way. This isn’t a satire, but it makes the same point as satire in the context of futuristic biopunk noir, with disease as a metaphor and McGuffin, with the subject matter being the unlikely intersection of disease and beauty, blemish and perfection. The world it presents is new, imaginative, and unsettling. It’s impossible to get through Antiviral without wincing several times. It’s not gore so much as squick factor, which is far worse than mere gore. I can watch Michael Ironside’s head exploding till the cows come home. But the early simple medical procedure in Antiviral will put you off your lunch. It’s only going to get worse.
Antiviral wouldn’t work without the fascinating Caleb Landry Jones in the lead role. His performance, which consists largely of lurching, is a thing to behold, every bit as integral to Antiviral as Jack Nicholson is to Chinatown.
Antiviral is available on VOD. Support Qt3 by watching it on Amazon.com.
Lovelorn mindfucks aren’t what they used to be. I mostly blame Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Jesse Armstrong’s fiercely insightful The Entire History of You from the British series Black Mirror didn’t help (watch it before the mostly likely toothless American remake arrives, courtesy of Robert Downey Jr). So it’s a bit late for Danny Boyle’s lightweight Trance, a mindfuck oddly jammed into a movie about an art heist by some lovable thugs. Don’t read too much into the early torture scene. It’ll pass. The real substance of movie is after the fact, when hypnotist Rosario Dawson helps James McAvoy recover his memory about the $27 million stolen Goya he misplaced. Oops. The solution comes down to Dawson’s shaved pubic hair. I’m not making that up. It’s particularly disappointing that this is what we get when Boyle rejoins Shallow Grave and Trainspotting screenwriter John Hodge.
At least Boyle knows how to shoot dreamlike energetic sequences that weave and build and crescendo spectacularly. The aforementioned reveal about Miss Dawson’s grooming, for instance. Anthony Dod Mantle’s lurid realer-than-real supersaturated cinematography is as gorgeous as ever (you can see Mantle’s work most recently in Dredd). And Trance has a sexy finale that makes me want to watch Boyle’s Sunshine again, which features fiery crescendos on a larger scale. But Trance ends with an unsatisfying “gotcha!” resolution that does more to sell iPads than elicit a-ha’s. Where’s my Eternal Sunshine DVD and Sunshine Blu-ray?
Among the many failings of The Walking Dead is stranding a good actor like Dallas Roberts, whose job as Woodbury scientist Milton Merle is to look concerned while less capable actors talk at him. To realize that Roberts is a good actor, you’d have to see what a perfect foil he is to Liam Neeson in Joe Carnahan’s existential survival drama The Grey, or you’d have to notice his small memorable role in the overlooked evil kid thriller Joshua. Because you certainly wouldn’t know he’s a good actor from Shadow People, in which Roberts is miscast as a burned-out, world weary, supposedly mellifluous radio talk show host who sometimes looks more like Val Kilmer than Dallas Roberts.
Shadow people are a silly concept pretty much invented by radio talk show callers who didn’t have the imagination to actually come up with something scary. The idea is that you see them out of the corner of your eye, or as you fall asleep, or some other time when you can’t really get a good look at them, which is convenient for the sorts of inarticulate folks who call Art Bell. One of the few decent things this movie does is flesh out the shadow people backstory by suggesting they were imported into the modern Western world from Southeast Asia, with the implication being payback for the Vietnam War. It’s less clever how the movie then supposes a viral social media propogation, as if you haven’t seen many horror movies since The Ring.
But it’s downright crass how Shadow People pretends to blend “documentary footage” with dramatization, a conceit ripped off from The Fourth Kind, right down to the refusal to credit the actors playing the characters in the documentary footage. As if this weren’t enough, the movie ends with a bibliography consisting of about eight things the writer/director claims to have read. Next time, I recommend he watch a movie like Mothman Prophecies, which demonstrates that it’s entirely possible to make a creepy movie out of the goofy lore that comes from late night talk radio.
Shadow People is available now on DVD and video on demand.
Tim Roth’s first movie was 1984’s The Hit, in which he played a hitman too hot under the collar for his own good, paired with the world weary and wiser John Hurt. If The Hit had turned out differently, The Liability could be its sequel, with Roth grown world weary and wiser thirty years later, and now paired with his own irresponsible young partner. Hence the title.
I love movies about dumb characters who don’t know they’re dumb. As the eponymous liability, Jack O’Connell has the same star quality Roth showed in The Hit, if not the same shrewd cool. What would be mugging in most performances comes across as energetic sincerity for O’Connell. He’s a really good actor, with excellent comic timing and a grand rapport with Roth. Some of my favorite moments in The Liability are O’Connell saying something stupid and Roth unable to muster the wither for a withering look. They’re a lovely team.
The Liability resembles In Bruges in some ways, including its sharp sense of dark humor. It sports truly clever twists and even flashes of astonishing style. A hypnotic “throw me the idol, I’ll give you the whip” scene plays like something Nicolas Winding-Refn would shoot, complete with the neon synth beat of a sexy pop song and the threat of violence coiled tightly just under the surface.
At one point, when Roth’s character is talking about his background, he mentions what sounds like “Angola”. Did he just say Angola?, you might wonder. Whatever. There are other things going on worth following. But later in the movie, when it’s clear that, yes, he did indeed say Angola and it’s relevant for a reason that was otherwise just a quirky detail, the payoff is one of those rare delights you’ll remember for a long time to come.
The Liability is available on video on demand. Watch it here to support Quarter to Three.
ABCs of Death, a wretched horror anthology in which 26 directors around the world were each given a letter of the alphabet to use as the basis for a short film, captures what it’s like to be a fan of horror movies: lots and lots of dreck, some of it gross, much of it inept, almost all of it forgettable. Yet buried underneath it all, you might find a rare gem. Are the three gems in ABCs of Death worth the 23 other shorts you have to sit through?
It won’t be easy. These shorts range from tedious to dull to flat-out “what the hell were you thinking, Ti West, because now you’ve made me like House of the Devil a little less?” They imply a Japanese preoccupation with farting and jacking off, as well as other countries’ directors expressing their fascination with turds and furries.
But the reasons to persevere are D for Dogfight, Q for Quack, and P for Pressure. Marcel Sarmiento, the director of the uneven but interesting Deadgirl, directs the sleekly hilarious and beautifully textured Dogfight, which is literally about a dogfight. The centerpiece of this live action short is a really awesome dog performance. Adam Wingard, the director of A Horrible Way to Die and the framing device for horror anthology V/H/S, seems fully aware of the futility of doing anything meaningful with five minutes and a random letter of the alphabet, particularly when his letter is Q. Both Dogfight and Quack realize that a good option for a horror short is a touch of black humor.
But then there’s Simon Rumley’s Pressure, which is hands down the best thing in this anthology, partly for how it plays with its title (few of these directors seemed to give a damn about their assigned letter, much less whatever word they came up with), but mostly for how it’s actually a horrific short about a character instead of just a hurried concept. Pressure makes the point that horrible things aren’t always only horrible things. This should come as no surprise if you’ve seen Red White & Blue, Rumley’s masterpiece revenge story, arranged in a heartbreaking lattice of confessionals, cross-motivations, and character reveals (Red White & Blue is available in Netflix’s instant view catalog and I cannot recommend it enough to anyone who can handle Jacobean excess). Pressure is exactly what I would expect the director of Red White & Blue to deliver.
ABCs of Death is available on video on demand services. Watch it here to support Quarter to Three.
At first, Citadel seems like a movie like Heartless, in which hooded demons prowl London and are mistaken for thuggish youths. Or Cronenberg’s The Brood. Or the part of Don’t Look Now that you don’t really know about until the final “WTF!” scene. The basic idea is that little people in hoods are scary because you don’t know what’s under the hood. Consider Phantasm. Or jawas.
But it turns out that Citadel isn’t just a monster movie. In fact, it’s a better Silent Hill movie than anything with the words “silent hill” in the title. This is a character driven story about an unprepared father coping with fear, and the Father whose help he needs. Furthermore, here is a movie unafraid to play with children in peril and perilous children. You would never see this in a safely American horror film that only imperils people over 18. Thank you, Irish director/writer Ciaran Foy.
In the main role, the distractingly good-looking and Orlando-Bloom-meets-Harry-Potter Aneurin Barnard spends most of his time shrinking, usually with his eyes shut tight. Is it really a good idea to make your main character such a coward? Given the point Citadel wants to make, there’s no way around it. This movie has no interest in whacking zombies with a crowbar. And in the one scene where that happens, the crowbar is ineffectual. It takes a mirror to seal the deal. Get it? James Cosmos — you probably know him from Game of Thrones — is a welcome variation on the usual priest monster-slayer. With a tiny blind child in tow, Barnard and Cosmos make for a memorable monster hunting party.
Citadel isn’t as heavy handed or action oriented as I might make it sound. It lolls around for a while, as an arthouse horror movie will do. This makes the shocking moments all the more shocking. There are about three effective scenes here that any low-budget horror movie would be lucky to have. Which makes Citadel at least three times better than most low-budget horror films.
Citadel is available on DVD and video on demand. Support Qt3 by watching it on Amazon instant video.
For a guy with three boring names, each more boring than the last, writer/director Paul Andrew Williams is utterly fascinating. If you’ve seen London to Brighton and The Cottage, you know what I mean. If you haven’t seen them, you should. Both of them. In any order. You pick. But see both of them. Because you can’t really get a sense for this British director’s talent without seeing both movies. And then, for good measure, see a weird arthouse horror movie he co-wrote called The Children.
All caught up? Good. Because now it’s time to see Cherry Tree Lane, Paul Andrew Williams’ grim horror thriller that you previously had to import from the UK to watch on a region-free DVD player. It was worth it. But lucky for you, it’s available today in the US where fine DVDs are sold and rented.
As you’re watching Cherry Tree Lane, you might think it’s a mean-spirited thriller preying uncomfortably on issues of race and class and how small the houses are in modern day London. You’d be partly right. But the point of Cherry Tree Lane — and I’m going to take pains not to spoil it beyond acknowledging it — is the last scene. Or, rather, the moment the last scene ends. The way the last scene ends. The musical cue on which the last scene ends, wanting only a thick red curtain dropped by a stagehand in the wings. All the building tension and pressure, from the very opening scene of water boiling on a stove to that last moment in the same kitchen, is entirely about how you as a viewer feel at that instant. I bet you didn’t know you had it in you? But Paul Andrew Williams did.
In The Strangers, freaky people in masks just show up and stab the protagonists. That’s pretty much all there is to it. I’ve never understood why some people find that movie even remotely entertaining, much less scary. Any good home invasion movie should have that early stage where the home invaders aren’t outed yet. For instance, in Funny Games, two dudes just want to borrow some eggs. In Straw Dogs, the local contractors are just a bit lazy. In Wait Until Dark, Richard Crenna is just a family friend. If you’re going to show up in creepy masks and just start stabbing people, I might as well watch Halloween.
In Their Skin, from first-time director Jeremy Regimbal and written by lead actor Joshua Close, is at its best during these early stages. It plays like a black comedy about the anxiety of meeting new people, about adjusting to unfamiliar social beats, about talking to people who seem like not-people wearing people disguises to study actual people. It’s the horror movie equivalent of a sitcom like Third Rock from the Sun, where the supposedly normal family is slightly askew in its attempt to seem normal.
James D’Arcy, whose interrogator was the least freaky non-Asian Asian in Cloud Atlas, is this movie’s greatest asset for his off-kilter eager friendliness and his fascinating Cumberbatch-esque face. But you also have to credit Rachel Miner — I didn’t recognize her, but she apparently had a stretch on Supernatural — for what she does with the usual supporting wife role. That’s the sort of look in your eye that only a good actress can fake. Her attempt at grief is one of the movie’s most startling moments.
Unfortunately, In Their Skin makes the mistake of ultimately being about the wrong group of characters. But until that happens, it’s a canny home invasion movie that takes the concept of class envy to a new level.
In Their Skin is available on DVD and VOD (watch it on Amazon.com here to support Qt3).
You might not know Spanish director Jaume Balaguero’s name, but surely you know his movie [Rec], a found-footage zombie movie. If “found-footage zombie movie” was a genre, [Rec] would easily be the best. But since it’s not really a genre, [Rec] is instead just a fantastic zombie movie.
[Rec] was co-directed by Balaguero and Paco Plaza. Plaza went on to do the ridiculous and not very effective [Rec] 3. Balaguero, on the other hand, has revisited the location and intimacy of [Rec] with a movie called Sleep Tight, set in an apartment building in Spain where something is going horribly wrong. The genius of Sleep Tight is how it unfolds the something going wrong, and how it puts the audience on the side of the monster instead of the victim. If this works, it is almost entirely because of an actor named Luis Tosar who plays the apartment building’s blandly brooding concierge. Sleep Tight isn’t so much a movie as a fascinating Tosar performance. Also, he has the most amazing eyebrows I’ve ever seen. You could make one heck of a fur coat out of those things.
Although Sleep Tight has some tautly directed sequences and even a few gratifying shocks, it feels inconsequential by the time it’s over. You can slot it neatly next to pretty much any movie about a psycho who does terrible things. Might I instead recommend the more memorable Montreal apartment building in Jacob Tierney’s Good Neighbors? Or just Polanski’s classic 1976 movie, The Tenant?
Sleep Tight is available now on DVD and VOD (support Qt3 by watching it here).
