Category / Horror

by Jonathan M

Cyclonopedia (2008) By Reza Negarestani – Madness/Theory/Truth/Nonsense

I once attended an academic conference where a member of the audience repeated a criticism made by the author of a rather successful book. In response to this criticism, the paper-giver smiled and began his response by saying “While I think that professor X should be praised for producing such an accessible work on the subject…” before going on to explain at great length why it was that he thought that professor X was both wrong and a grotesquely ugly freak. Though I cannot remember the subject of the paper, or the criticism made of its position, or the response given to said criticism, I can still remember the audible intake of breath and the appreciative tittering from the audience when the speaker applied the word ‘accessible’ to the work of another academic. The dynamics of this withering intellectual put-down are easy enough to unpack: if a work is accessible then it means that it is written with a non-specialist audience in mind and if a work is intended to be consumed by people who are new to the subject then it cannot hope to break new-ground. However, if the aesthetics of accessibility are ‘wrong’ then what are the right aesthetics?

 

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Living and The Dead (2007)

Every now and then, a film comes out that seems to slip completely through the net.  Not picked up by the festival circuit, the major distributors or even the more cultish elements of the genre scene, it washes up on the shore of DVD review sites unloved and largely ignored.  Kristjan Milic’s The Living and The Dead is the kind of film that provides a compelling argument for the continued existence of DVD review sites as it is not only unloved outside of its native Croatia, it is also genuinely brilliant.

Set in two different time-frames, the film explores the idea (much beloved of Nigel Kneale) that certain places in the world have a memory of their own.  A memory so deep and so dark that it curves the emotional space around it.  Sucking in positive emotions and leaving only misery and death in its wake.  Despite clearly being a work of fantastical cinema, The Living and The Dead is relentlessly mundane in its focus… in fact, you could quite easily read the film as just the story of two groups of soldiers fighting and dying for the same insignificant scrap of land.  But to do that would be to ignore some beautifully evocative ideas.

Videovista has my review.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Buried (2010)

Late last year, Rodrigo Cortes’s film about a man buried alive in Iraq was released to a good deal of serious critical attention.  Ostensibly an experimental work primarily concerned with trying to inject textured tension and atmosphere without ever leaving the confines of a small wooden box.  Though successful in this regard, the film’s use of the word ‘Iraq’ lead some overly eager critics to jump to the conclusion that the film is some grand allegory for American foreign policy.  It isn’t.  It’s a very silly film about a man trapped in a box which, despite glimmers of intelligence, is ultimately let-down by a decidedly lackluster script.

Videovista has my review.

In the review, I also mention Stuart Gordon’s film Stuck (2007), which I reviewed on this very site a couple of years ago.  That’s a much better film, go and watch that one instead.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Deep Red (1975)

Another month and another batch of new reviews up at Videovista.

Experience has taught me and I have learned my lessons well.  My natural film-viewing habits tend to be very director-based.  If I see a film I enjoy then my first reaction is generally to seek out that director’s other work.  Similarly, I will not go to see a film in order to see a particular actor, or to see the work of a particular writer.  But I will go out of my way to see a film by a particular director even if the subject matter does not initially speak to me.  This relationship is one of trust.  I trust certain directors to take me to certain places.

I do not trust Dario Argento.

Partly this is a reflection of the fact that he has had a very long career filled with many ups and downs but it is also due to the fact that I need to be in a quite specific frame of mind to tolerate the ostentatious silliness that characterises Argento’s style.  As my review of Profondo Rosso suggests, I was in the right frame of mind to watch a stylishly directed and fiendishly well composed whodunit.  Excellent job on the extras by Arrow too, who really are one of the best distributors out there when it comes to putting out old exploitation films.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – We Are What We Are (2010)

THE ZONE have my review of Jorge Michel Grau’s recent art house cannibal film We Are What We Are (a.k.a. Somos Lo Que Hay).

Though undeniably atmospheric and full of potential, the film never quite manages to get its ducks in a row.  Instead of developing a coherent line of thought, the film flirts with various ideas.  Cannibalism as a relationship with one’s family.  Cannibalism as living a GLBT lifestyle.  Cannibalism as living in a state with a corrupt police force.  All of these ideas drift through the script and the film’s imagery but none of them are ever fleshed out or pursued.

Watching the film I was reminded of the post-’68 vendetta waged by the Cahiers du Cinema against Costa-Gavras’ film Z (1969).  In her flawed but punchy history of the Cahiers, A Short History of Cahiers du Cinema(2010), Emilie Bickerton characterises the Cahiers reaction to the Serie-Z as :

With Z you had a film-maker who was addressing politics on the surface, but simultaneously banalizing it.  Costa-Gavras was thus perfectly attuned to the changes in public demand: he offered a film that was shot with panache, a lively score, a hint of experimentation (…) it was intelligent and committed but never revolutionary, in either narrative content or aesthetic form. — pp. 65

I think a similar failing can be identified in We Are What We Are.  It is a film that relies quite heavily upon an audience’s familiarity with genre tropes.  To make sense of the film, you have to be aware of serial killer narratives, zombie narratives and crime narratives.  It presents itself as a film that has taken on the ideas and imagery of genre only to project them forward into a more ‘grown up’ cinematic milieu and so it appeals to people who, though familiar with genre tropes, are wanting more from their cinematic experiences than explosions and special effects.  However, despite promising a deeper level of intellectual engagement than your average genre piece, We Are What We Are is empty and insubstantial.

This is a growing problem.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Fallen Sparrow (1943)

“To shoot people, sweetheart!”

And with those words… my heart soared with joy.

Richard Wallace’s The Fallen Sparrow is very much an overlooked gem.  One of a series of novels by Dorothy B. Hughes that were adapted for the screen during the hey-day of the film noir, The Fallen Sparrow is a demented psychological thriller in which a tortured veteran of the Spanish Civil War cuts a swathe through New York high society as he attempts to solve the (possible) murder of the man who helped him escape the clutches of the Gestapo.  As the veteran moves from reconnecting with his old friends and into a world of sinister academics and crusading noblemen, the lines between reality and delusion blur and then finally disappear.  Boasting a fantastic script and some rather surprising performances, The Fallen Sparrow deserves its place in cinema history.

Videovista have my review.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – 7 Days (2009)

Videovista have my review of Daniel Grou’s Quebecois Thriller Les 7 Jours du Talion.

The film was written by the same person who wrote the novel upon which it is based.  However, somewhat unusually, the film adaptation manages to completely miss the point of the novel.  The original book is all about a man who kidnaps his daughter’s murderer and announces to the media that he will torture the killer to death and then turn himself in to the police.  When the torture begins it is clear that the man is not psychologically equipped for the task and that in order to exact revenge the man must change.  He must effectively kill the person he once was and become someone much closer to his daughter’s killer, someone who can torture and murder another human being.  What makes the novel so interesting is the fact that the arguments for and against the man carrying out his threat are played out in real time through the media.  So, in effect, the man externalises his conscience.

Bizarrely, the film downplays this act of externalisation leaving only a somewhat dull and repetitive series of torture set-pieces.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Dinner Party (2009)

Videovista have my review of Scott Murden’s The Dinner Party, an Australian psychological thriller.

Though rather unyielding in tone (it contains no changes in tempo or plot twists that might vary the mood or allow the degree of tension to vary), the film contains a really insightful commentary on the potential of friendship, love and politeness to enable the worst kinds of transgressive behaviour.  In essence, the film is an assault on the glaze of consent and agreement that we apply to all of our social interactions.

Nice to see an Australian film filtering through to UK release too.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Van Diemen’s Land (2009)

VideoVista have my review of Jonathan auf der Heide’s Van Diemen’s Land.

The film is all about Alexander Pearce, a man who escaped from a British penal colony only to wind up killing and eating the people he escaped with.  The film itself is almost a remake of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising (2009), a film I reviewed and ranted about at some length for its generic style.  Much like Valhalla Rising, Van Diemen’s Land fails to say anything of substance about the issues it raises.  This is largely due to a failure on behalf of both directors to understand their literary source material : Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

On the plus side, watching this film did prompt me to seek out James Rowland’s The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce (2008), which is a much better and more thought-provoking film that really gets to grips with what it is that might transform a man from a petty thief into a monster.

by Jonathan M

Black Death (2010) – The Appeal of a Well-Ordered Universe

Existentialism exists as a result of two cultural forces :

The first, which inspired early 19th Century existential authors and thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, was the hollowing out of traditional culture by the advances made in science and bureaucracy.  A process referred to by the sociologist Max Weber as the disenchantment of the world.  This rising tide of scientific thought washed away many old certainties about the meaning of life and the nature of the Universe and left behind it a beach of mere facts.  This left an unexpected hollow at the centre of European cultural life and the work of the first generation of existential thinkers can be seen as an attempt to address the question of how to live with this void of meaning.

The second, which inspired 20th Century thinkers including Sartre, Camus and the Frankfurt School, was the cultural fallout from the Holocaust.  If the first wave of existentialist thought was trying to grapple with the god-shaped hole at the heart of the human condition, then this second wave was an attempt to deal with humanity’s unexpected willingness to fill that hole with monsters.  Indeed, far from heralding a new golden age and a dismantling of the old taboos and prejudices, the disenchanted 20th Century saw humanity choosing to surrender its new-found existential and moral freedoms to a series of psychotic deities who were more than happy to obliterate anything and anyone who stood in the way of their attempt at imposing a moral order upon an otherwise chaotic universe.

Erich Fromm attempted to understand why it was that humanity had decided to surrender its freedoms in such a shocking manner.  His first book The Fear of Freedom (1941) argues that Humans find freedom to be an unpleasant experience.  When the rules that bind a society start to decompose, there is initial elation but before long, people find that being merely free from impediment is not enough.  They need values and boundaries that will give their lives meaning and allow them to orient themselves.  This pushes societies confronted with radical freedom to seek out new ideologies that will lessen the feelings of anxiety, emptiness and isolation engendered by negative liberty.

Christopher Smith’s fourth feature film Black Death is an exploration of these kinds of themes.  Set in medieval England at a time when plague and violence stalk the land, it seeks to answer the question of what it is that is so attractive about a well-ordered moral universe and why it is that humans are prepared to commit all kinds of atrocities in order to defend their beliefs even when they themselves are assailed by doubts.

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