Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990)

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Director: Jeff Burr

Screenplay: David J. Schow

Cast: Kate Hodge (as Michelle); Ken Foree (as Benny); R.A. Mihailoff (as Leatherface 'Junior' Sawyer); William Butler (as Ryan); Viggo Mortensen (as Eddie 'Tex' Sawyer); Joe Unger (as Tinker Sawyer); Tom Everett (as Alfredo Sawyer); Miriam Byrd-Nethery (as Mama Sawyer)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #86

The wheels started to fall off the Chainsaw cart just by the third film but I don't necessary blame director Jeff Burr for this. (This isn't a review of his later film Devil's Den (2006), where I'd throw a shoe at him if I could). Gore removed, gore added back in the DVD release, an alternative ending directed and the sense, whilst lots of gore wouldn't have necessarily boosted the film's quality, that Leatherface's problems stem from the franchise starting to become unstuck on the cusp of the 1990s. In spite of some critical re-evaluation that it's been getting, it feels stuck as a franchise film at a time when horror cinema was slowly changing, one with great odd one-offs but where a lot of franchises were slowly dying, and without Tobe Hooper in the driver's seat it's unfortunately a "franchise film" in the negative way, without taking risks and trying to recapture the first film's popularity without realising the risk was what helped it. That's weird for me to say when in its unrated form, Leatherface is caked in grim and unmentionable liquids, one of the most openly provocative of the first four films in tone and dialogue especially, not as intense as the first or second, but just deliberately unpleasant in tone where encounters sexually perverse and racist cannibals, but this is still a safe film. As the 2003 remake will attest to, that for all the gore and nastiness you still have something staying within the confines of a mainstream horror movie, one where glam metal is still on the soundtrack, an irony not realised as, when grunge apparently killed off glam in the early nineties, horror films in the slasher-like fold like this would get knocked off quickly too.

To Leatherface's credit, there's plenty of things to pick up on in spite of the ultimate disappointment with it. It has a credible, menacing atmosphere of isolated desert highways and swampy woodland that's befitting the material, where everything feels rusted, old or crusty without it coming off as ridiculously glamorous in a sick way. Some of the grim, admittedly, can be heavy handed - Tom Everett's misogynistic, peeping tom gas station owner and sociopath is a failed attempted to follow Chop Top from the last film - but the sense of danger is appropriate everywhere else. It blurs the line between entertainment, a New Line Cinema production, and an extreme horror film right down to recreating the ran over armadillo from the first film, replacing the immaculate (but somewhat absurd) taxidermy creation from a realistic animatronics one that, in a moment I openly admit to feeling sad about, cries in pain after protagonist Michelle (Kate Hodge) and her obnoxious boyfriend Ryan (William Butler) accidentally run over and have to put out of its misery. At first it can make the strange mix of different types of film work; the sense of horror and underground culture starting to bubble up to the surface, the gore lovin' horror film fan and music genres like death metal having grown up at the time of the second film or so, is found even here which explains a lot of the tone. The gore is still strong, even with cutaways and censorship, alongside its intensity in general mood.

Helping this is that again, the Leatherface family is still as interesting as before. By this point, like marking out the timeline for Highlander sequels, the family tree for this clan isn't worth trying to map out, instead worth viewing each version in each of the first four films as different entities that the scripts all wisely allow to stretch their legs and express themselves as different groups. It's to the point with the exception of whenever Ken Foree is onscreen, especially as Ryan is such an obnoxious prick to suffer as a lead and Hodge only getting a lot more to work with as the heroine in the final act, that actually the stalk-and-chase scenes and the horror moments meant to sell it which are tedious, more interesting to follow the villains instead. A matriarchal clan, a squabbling yet close whose nicely decorated home comes from an older, nicer period of American only with more dead animal parts and a homemade skull crushing machine in the kitchen, a disturbing concept at play too with a little girl amongst them as a born sociopath with a knife hidden in her dolly. No matter how bland the film can get, it will always has some redemption for the scene, even if it might offend other Chainsaw fans, were Leatherface tries learning from a speak and spell machine only to always type "FOOD" on the screen, one of those bizarre and fun character pieces that you only get once in a while in Hollywood horror movies and the only time in the first four films of the series the least interesting depiction of the iconic character has anything of interest to do onscreen.

Then of course you have Viggo Mortensen as Tex, first the handsome cowboy who you'd understand completely wooing Michelle from an obnoxiously written boyfriend, but is also as great as a gangly, weird loon later on. The same year as Philip Ridley's The Reflection Skin (1990) where he had a main role, for a picture of his career at this point, even in a messy, divisive horror film like this, as with Matthew McConaughey in the fourth one, you can tell quite early in his career how good and varied an actor he is, running rings around many of the others to a noticeable extend. One exception though, and another redeeming part of Leatherface, is Ken Foree as a survivalist, Benny, who ends up in this horrible predicament with Michelle and having to fight back, an absolute gem in the film just by himself. He even steals scenes from Mortensen with his own natural charisma that can juggle humour, even lines that would cause one to cringe if anyone else said them, with the ability to act like a credible touch man, harder to do in a genre film in acting than you may presume but what he managed all the way back in Dawn of the Dead (1978) and here.

The problems really come in Leatherface attempting to be a horror film. It's a fool's errand after the first two sequels that three and four thought of recreating scenes from the first film without realising how poorly they'd look in comparison, like here when Leatherface chases a woman through the woods with a chainsaw, as with what I've now realise about my tastes in how, with great exceptions, stalk and chase scenes in horror are now becoming my least favourite completely due to their laziness in execution. It's also the sequel attempting to be a box office hit, which leads to the most egregious flaws in attempting to keep butts at the edge of the seat. Moments appear throughout the film, like the misused subplot of a previous female survivor still rooming the area in a near catatonic state, but it's really by the end of the film when all hell breaks loose where it starts makes stupid decisions, ditching the interest it generated following the Leatherface clan for something more generic. Action scenes of fighting and setting people on fire, the egregious use of heavy metal riffs in moments that are meant to feel awesome or intense, such as the final chase scenes, but come off as cheesy, and a general rush to the finishing line that blurs together with no actual horror to them.

The clash between being a greasy, cruel movie - where the heroine has to have her hands nailed to chair arms rather than tied on and dialogue at one point with gruesome implications of sexual violence - and a mainstream horror sequel really becomes problematic as if feels as if it's both trying too hard to be extreme and that it's also, for all the good moments within it, too predictable and even has its legs chopped off by the finale when it could've gotten interesting, pure gorgonzola topping it all in an ending that was changed to be happier in spite of an obvious plot hole and pure luck being involved with the result narratively. Leatherface altogether comes off as a bastard creation stuck between tones with haphazard decisions alongside the good ideas.

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

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Director: Tobe Hooper

Screenplay: L. M. Kit Carson

Cast: Dennis Hopper (as Lt. Boude "Lefty" Enright); Caroline Williams (as DJ Vanita "Stretch" Brock); Jim Siedow (as Drayton); Bill Johnson (as Leatherface); Bill Moseley (as Chop Top); Lou Perryman (as L.G.)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #85

Twelve years later and Tobe Hooper would return to the film that cemented his reputation in horror cinema with a sequel. Attempting to repeat the first Chainsaw film would've been nigh on impossible to complete successfully. Thankfully, despite its negative critical reception originally, the sequel became a personal favourite of mine for what it did drastically different to step out of its prequel's shadow. As much as the first film is the masterpiece, number two is the one I love for what, contestable with Lifeforce (1985), is the peak of Hooper's more manic and hysterical filmmaking. Now the Leatherface clan, cannibalistic sociopaths, are running a successful dining business, only to have to worry about their slaughtering of two yuppies having been recorded live on air during a radio show hosted by Stretch (Caroline Williams), and the uncle of one of their previous victims Lt. "Lefty" (Dennis Hopper) gunning after them as a man as deranged as them once they've reawakened their presence in public again. The result is as eighties as possible - the rough, grimy independent scored by atonal drones is now a colourful Cannon Releasing picture score by cult bands like Oingo Boingo and The Cramps - but the same grotesque tone of the first film is still there, only more weirder. The first was impossible to top in terms of its unrelenting, decaying tone, but the tone Hooper adopted from The Funhouse (1981) onwards, added carnivalesque tone with the grubbiness of before, perfectly suits what the first sequel needed to do to differentiate itself.

Whilst the first was an audiovisual hell of rotting props, the sequel's madness is more exaggerated and openly, gleefully twisted thanks to Tom Savini's more openly visceral practical effect and a cast (Bill Moseley and Hopper especially) that's willing to chew the scenery, Caroline Williams the sole sane figure in the midst of the madness around her with the exception of Lou Perryman as a great good ol' boy and potential love interest L.G. Even the set locations seem as heightened and alive as the characters, the radio station a richly coloured and cluttered environment, whilst the finale set in an abandoned war museum that includes attritions about the Alamo is one of the most unique sets for an eighties horror movie you'll find, skeletons in various bizarre positions to catch out of the corner of your eyes and a junkyard of lighting sources, bones and horrible yet strangely humorous trinkets to cast your gaze over. In the middle of all this, Dennis Hooper at his most heightened behind Frank Booth in Blue Velvet (also 1986), a religious minded cop obsessed with vengeance, and Bill Moseley nailing his debut, and cementing his cult status at the same time, with Chop Top, a twin of the Hitchhiker which cross-pollinates a hippie and a Vietnam war veteran into one of the strangest characters in American horror film history, caked on grey makeup and metal skull piece, the kind of character that in any other film would've been excruciating in his maniac behavour, from molesting corpses to crying out for the Leatherface family to build 'Nam Land, but is utterly compelling to watch instead. (Especially when compared to examples trying to replicate Moseley's work in later Chainsaw sequels) Add to this Jim Siedow returning as the Cook, having some of the funniest and political satirical lines, and what could've been utterly overbearing in tone is perversely playful.  

Especially as someone who's taste in horror comedy can vary, this one manages to find the right balance, something that need to include the presence of screenwriter L. M. Kit Carson, a man who two years earlier wrote the script for Wim Wender's Paris, Texas; whilst the story had to be boiled down further due to the low budget the production was given, it's noticeable how more inspired and full of memorable dialogue the script is, even when it comes to moments of exposition, and honestly even next to the first film, this is the film in the series where the quality of the writing, even in a b-movie horror film, really has a significant effect on its virtues. The result of this is that this greater sense of humour, well written, makes the material even more disgusting at points. This is still a film, whilst funny to reflect on, where someone's face is removed with an electronic carver you'd used to cut turkey, a lurid nastiness that's perversely funny common in a lot of Hooper's films and, unlike the first where I just found it intense and nightmarish throughout, has more space here to skewer your reactions to the carnage involved. 

Now fed on Reaganomic politics and the era of yuppie culture, it's a vastly different film from the first but for the better, allowing for me as a fan of the pair to have two films that don't conflict together, able to exist in the same universe but within the span of one being a seventies film and the other an eighties film, the former a rough and nasty film to reflect its period, the later reflecting the horror comedies of the eighties which still caused one to feel icky and weird, the former a nasty and real looking film of events that could take place in backwater USA, the later whilst feeling authentically Texan even as someone who hasn't set foot there whilst being intentionally broad, Chop-Top all the worst qualities of the previous eras politics made into a cartoon and no one paying broad mind to the clear lack of sanitary measures to the Leatherface family's award winning chilli, especially when Siedow can convince someone a tooth is actually a piece of shell. The politics are merely a slither to the second film for me personally, a background influence that's still as important and a virtue but not overpowering, like with the first film, with this being a piece of carnivalesque American grotesquery first. A large part of the film's success is that, knowing of its troubled production history (the budget slashed down to badly, the negative reaction from the producers about the film being a comedy horror story than a remake of the first film), it's maddened tone feels natural and uncompromised. Even before the final act where the film becomes it's most intense, the experience is as frenzied as you could get already as a living breathing fantasy. 

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Under the Shadow (2016)

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Director: Babak Anvari

Screenplay: Babak Anvari

Cast: Narges Rashidi (as Shideh); Avin Manshadi (as Dorsa); Bobby Naderi (as Iraj); Ray Haratian (as Mr. Ebrahimi); Arash Marandi (as Dr. Reza); Bijan Daneshmand (as the Director)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #84

If there ever was a case of crushing disappointment, not instant but a day after upon reflection when the buzz is dwindling and one thinks more level headedly about a film, then Under the Shadow, a Persian language horror drama set within the Iran-Iraq war in Tehran with politics of the Middle East seeping through the walls the heroine Shideh (Narges Rashidi) becomes affectively trapped in with her daughter Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), is a despairing example when a film doesn't live up to expectations. It's a common habit for me, unless a film completely sinks itself into my memory both positively and/or with confusion whether I liked it or not, usually becoming a film I love later as I appreciate how I had to work with them to gain something from them, that movies I had an exceptionally positively view on the day before lose their lustre immediately when it becomes common in hindsight I'd never need to watch them again. Both obscure films but also critically acclaimed ones, even sacred cows, can fall for this when even the most scabby of b-flick schlock can have a greater imprint on my mind in their virtues that make them worth revisiting. However with Under the Shadow, the problem is entirely what it brings in expectation through two-thirds of its length until it becomes utterly predictable supernatural horror.

Shideh is now, in post-revolution Iran, unable to become a doctor due to being involved in mid-revolution protests. The entire white elephant of gender inequality in Middle Eastern conservative values becomes as much a weight that crushes her slowly as the war looming over her apartment complex is, the later dropping an unexploded bomb in the roof that starts to cause tenants to leave on mass, the former putting pressure on her even if it leads to potentially ill advised actions. Adding emotional complexity, she's far from a saint capable of terrible behaviour even as a loving mother, like staying in her apartment flat and taking a rational, strict view of her daughter's belief a jinn is roaming the floors, having stolen her beloved doll and drawing her closer as her mother's more aggressive, stressed behaviour pushes her away.

The film starts as a Repulsion (1965) story where the pain of the real world hurts Shideh as the increased number of supernatural influence mirrors reality back. In Tehran, she is as much stuck in real life as in the throes of a supernatural demon of the wind, attempting to flee the home only to be arrested for not covering her head and forced back home. The stress of losing her desired goal as a doctor, her husband Iraj (Bobby Naderi) away to help as a doctor in the war and in a flayed relationship where she feels he looks down at her, feeds the monstrosity terrorising them in the flat and whole building, bringing promise of the psychological horror of Japanese cinema but with a decidedly unique viewpoint in being a film about Middle Eastern modern culture, even if it's set in the eighties with Jane Fonda workout videotapes, and at first emphasising both drama which tackles real world issues and using a figure, the jinn of that culture than using a cliché from Western horror cinema.

However with this complex portrayal of politics, culture and gender in mind, alongside a slow burn pace which drags out the discomfort of the jinn terrorising her and her daughter in subtle ways, it's dismaying to find that the film becomes a generic supernatural horror movie in the Hollywood template with constant jump scares and emphasis on CGI in the finale. It feels like an entire page is ignored, when a mythological creature as significant in Arabic and Islamic culture like a jinn, unique to that culture with countless versions told and with complexity to their behaviour in said stories, is reduced to a faceless ghost under a sheet. That it's a horror film first, subtext between the lines, is worst in seeing how what is such a quietly put together, well paced story which drip feds jump scares one at a time becomes reduced to the jinn chasing the central characters through the house without any sense of emotional resolution or complexity, not functioning as a horror movie trying to be more serious as a result. What started off as a buzz liking the movie became hollow as it didn't live up to being a more distinct film making its own direction with its own style and issues to tackle, instead latching onto clichés as its centre it could've done without. Particularly as someone who wishes to see films from all around the world especially in horror, even if this is a UK production shot in Jordan, this is a heart breaking result when non-English, non-European interpretations of even simple ghost stories is something we are in dire need of especially now for a sense of global interaction as cineastes. 

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The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

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Director: Tobe Hooper

Screenplay: Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel

Cast: Marilyn Burns (as Sally); Allen Danziger (as Jerry); Paul A. Partain (as Franklin); William Vail (as Kirk); Teri McMinn (as Pam); Edwin Neal (as the Hitchhiker); Jim Siedow (as the Cook); Gunnar Hansen (as Leatherface); John Dugan (as the Grandfather)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #83

How do I even cover The Texas Chain Saw Massacre when countless professional writers and documentary filmmakers have done so many times? Honestly the only way is realising, now seeing this film 4K resolution in the golden age of preservation, how this cleaned up sheen doesn't hide but reveal how grimy and disgusting the film is. Growing up at the time the whole fiasco of this film being unavailable in the UK had gone when James Ferman of the BBFC was, and able to buy this film for the first time on DVD in a Tescos supermarket (?!), I came to it less as the forbidden fruit of horror as older British horror fans did but as the controversial statesman of American seventies horror that shredded ones nerves, a film I actually dissected in college Film Studies classes but still found greasy and nasty even after combing over it for my amateurism first attempts of critical evaluation. It's a film that only when you're watching it again rather than going by face value, as five unwitting young adults break down in their van in Texas and encounter a family of cannibals, how from the start to the end it's a dirt ridden, festering film in tone. Yes the title and iconic poster suit the film inside but sitting through Chain Saw for the first time in years I also can put them to the actual movie and its own virtues. When many canonical horror films are put up to iconic status, actually watching them again brings forth a reality check when you realise how provocative and still dangerous in tone ones like Chain Saw still are, especially with the 2013 sequel in 3D being a neutered Hollywood creation and a second prequel existing but yet to be released.

Were it not for Marilyn Burn's white bell bottoms and some of the floral shirts, this film would exist in a timeless reality of desolate dirt roads and petrol stations barely open. It's routed in the political and social issues of the time it was made, but like most of these Southern set, southern made American exploitation films (at least the most evocative), they're one step away from the Southern Gothic, are submerged within it. For all the realism and harshness of the film's editing and atonal score by Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell, it's also filled with melancholic, almost half asleep country music and the Leatherface family can't help but evoke something Flannery O'Conner could create if she was more extreme, barely functioning but with strangely idyllic family values. Working class, hard working Americans, with respect for their grandparents and their wisdom, as the mummified Grandpa sits centre at the dining table, Leatherface the improvised matriarch and younger brother who keeps the home clean of random unwanted guests, a living room of bone furniture without a brain rotting TV and a pet chicken swinging in a cage, details which thankfully would keep being added and played with in the first few sequels so that, whether you liked the films or not, the Leatherface family would still be used to skewer idyllic family structures continually.

And the film's revolting in tone, a revulsion that for certain people, who are wired a certain way like myself and honour these horror movies, which is repulsive and strain our eyes and yet, from a distance, attract us with their rundown, decayed allured. The Franklin house the protagonists get to itself is full of giant balls of Daddy Long Legs and rotten animal print wallpaper, a grim sense of abandonment before you get to the Leatherface home full of art director Robert A. Burns' ritualistic and magnificent abominations of bone and flesh. Notoriously the set the film worked in was hellish - rotting props, actors like Gunner Hansen stuck with only one costume, makeup artist Dorothy J. Pearl accidentally stabbing herself with a needle of formaldehyde whilst preparing real dead animals for background objects - all of which you can feel and even smell from the screen. That it's aesthetics that of an abattoir, imagining Frederick Wiseman's documentary Meat (1976) in its visceral and down-to-earth nature as the film's tone without ever going into an actual slaughterhouse, just adds to the repulsion even if I'm someone comfortable still with eating meat.

A lot of also why the film still retains is power is also why Tobe Hooper is still an underappreciated director. It's impossible for me to view Chain Saw as a comedy as others can for how unrelenting it is, too intense and like having nails pulled off, but the tone of unpredictability and manic energy, between being twisted and then hilariously weird, is still there and the key thing that keeps it all together, weaving all the other virtues (the naturalist, scorched cinematography, Burns' and everyone elses' performance etc) around it. Sadly Hooper got dismissed for having made little of interest until his later films - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II (1986), Lifeforce (1985), The Funhouse (1981) - got reappraisals, and even now it doesn't get talked about enough how all his films at least to the nineties have an incredible, frantic nature to them rare to his contemporaries, the equivalent of someone in a straight-jacket bouncing off the rubber walls in how chaotic the tone of the films feel, a rare virtue when even the most offensive, violent horror film like now feels "safe" because of its measured, flat atmosphere.

Thankfully with the 1986 sequel this same tone, injected with more brazen humour, was resurrected creating a personal favourite of mine alongside the original prequel, although the obvious concern with this franchise after the first film, like with Halloween (1978) onwards, is whether any of the same intentions are to be found in later sequels having confirmed the first Chain Saw is a stone cold, canonical masterpiece of the horror genre.

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The Premonition (1976)

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Director: Robert Allen Schnitzer

Screenplay: Robert Allen Schnitzer and Anthony Mahon

Cast: Sharon Farrell (as Sheri Bennett); Edward Bell (as Prof. Miles Bennett); Danielle Brisebois (as Janie Bennett); Ellen Barber (as Andrea Fletcher); Richard Lynch (as Jude); Chitra Neogy (as Dr. Jeena Kingsly); Jeff Corey (as Det. Lt. Mark Denver)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #82

One of the more sorrowful and melancholic films from classic American horror and exploitation cinema, The Premonition's been a slow burner I've grown to admire more and more on the rewatches. Its position as a horror film is transitional, closer to a "weird tale" in how, even if the supernatural is directly involved, it doesn't follow the conventions of a supernatural horror film. Instead, about a couple Sheri (Sharon Farrell) and Prof. Miles Bennett (Edward Bell) who realise the mother Andrea Fletcher (Ellen Barber) of their adoptive daughter is trying to claim her back with the help of carnival mime and photographer Jude (Richard Lynch), the ghosts in the film are entirely in terms of emotional states and a paranormal slant. We're not in the era of vague entities for merely jump scares,  but ones with a greater connection to the characters as they are presented through the story.

It's very unconventional, not in style, an elegant and very understated presentation in form, but in terms of how calm and sombre said tone is. From a director who comes from experimental short films, he presents an A-to-B narrative that yet plays out as a supernatural drama which great emphasis on the later word rather than merely presenting the content blandly on the surface. The Premonition does follow in an trend of seventies cinema that could easily divide people - the paranormal trend and ideals that'd get lumped in as New Age or those books about aliens being the creators of the Earth unfairly without dividing them into their various areas of belief - but this is the case of a director who has real belief in those sported by paranormal expert Dr. Jeena Kingsly (Chitra Neogy) but never makes the mistake of going into the over earnest and kitsch. Instead, when a vengeful spirit starts to infect Sheri's personal space and haunt her, Schnitzer depicts it with a matter of fact attitude, only the broadness of some of the exposition in talking about the unknown different from what takes a very calm, naturalistic depiction of what would happen if dead spirits could actually effect a person, keeping the film as well in an admirable area of emotional conflicts being always the driving force behind the phenomenon. Instead of something utterly laughable or silly like other paranormal horror films from this decade, The Premonition feels like a more real representation of this type of material, Schnitzer level headed in depicting these events and ideas, including fate and the spirit world entering the living one, without any sense of the absurd but with realism in context of this specific world being depicted. This also means that most if not all the characters are more complicated even if they eventually side into slots of whether you want to be on their side or not, drama mixing with horror with great success. Sympathy is given to Andrea Fletcher, a psychologically unstable pianist whose child was taken away from her due to her mental illness, as much to Sheri as parallel mothers, the sense of pain between them as well for those surrounding them a significant part to why the film feels as mature as it is.

When The Premonition does flex its muscles as a horror film, it's appropriately creepy and effective. An emphasis on drama, slow and deliberately paced, but willing to fully convey the unnatural. Flash frames of Richard Lynch, stealing every scene he's in with his angelic face but menacing personality,  creating the most terrifying face whilst groaning, the bathroom mirror and car windscreen freezing up, paintings bleeding from the eyes, moments which because of the film taking its time to portray everything around these scare sequences more carefully allows them to have a greater impact, suddenly shook aware by an alarming moment of phantasmagoria. It's surprising not many films follow this rule and instead fail as miserably as they do, but in the case of The Premonition it's not only done well but, with the significant time and intercontinental span between them, I can't help now when thinking of it carefully that, whilst an American tradition that sadly died away when slashers started to get more popular in the eighties and horror films became a primarily teenage audience demographic, it's cousins are technically Japanese films like Ringu (1998) and The Grudge (2004) in their slow paced, character building structures. Add to this the southern atmosphere that is undeniably an American part of the film it uses to its advantage, particular a carnival location so much more welcoming than that in Malatesta's Carnival of Blood (1973), and the general quality of the performances and I've found myself loving The Premonition the more I view it. 

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Malatesta's Carnival of Blood (1973)

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Director: Christopher Speeth

Screenplay: Werner Liepolt

Cast: Janine Carazo (as Vena); Jerome Dempsey (as Blood); Daniel Dietrich (as Malatesta) Lenny Baker (as Sonja); Hervé Villechaize (as Bobo); William Preston (as Sticker)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #81

Synopsis: At a carnival fairground, a family hired to run one of the amusement stands learns too late that a family of blood drinking, subterranean cannibals live underneath the site.

The likes of Malatesta's Carnival of Blood encapsulates what's rewarding about American exploitation and horror cinema from the seventies for me, regional productions with plenty of virtues alongside a lot of confounding aspects that make me feel as if I've been induced with a hallucinogenic whilst watching them adding to their personalities. Right from its survival through word of mouth and the director Christopher Speeth's own print of the movie, it's a grimy and eccentric experience where even the aspects that could be seen as shambolic are virtues too. The theme park itself where the film is filmed at is enticing in itself for this horror film with its wooden rollercoaster and grotty Tunnel of Love, evoking the similar emotion of local seaside fairs in my home country of England, of black stained swan boats and collapsing miniature golf courses away from the pristine tourist attractions,  fascinating for me for this decay alongside their colours and innocence. It makes perfect sense, in a purely constructed environment of strange rides in the shape of animals and ghost trains, for there to be cannibals behind the staff doors underground watching silent films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) in their free time. For Hervé Villechaize to suddenly appear, in the cutting abruptly to a new scene, as Bobo the Dwarf warning the female protagonist Vena (Janine Carazo) of the place whilst waving a shooting gallery rifle at her. A place where it's absurd when the titular Malatesta (Daniel Dietrich) to be riding a rollercoaster by himself, (imagine a more competent version of the Master from Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) in a Dracula cape and black suit), but also making sense within the completely artificial environment where attractions already exaggerate fantastical iconography for rides.

Technical Detail:

That this weaves in avant-garde aspects into the madness is unexpected but leads to the film becoming more delirious. The general rawness of the film, a lived-in quality in its setting and performances, immediately appeals to me and adds a far greater sense of believability, which is a lot of the reason why seventies films, even when they can be amateurish and wooden in tone at points, have become so much more rewarding than a lot of the more modern horror movies which are visibly contrived with glossy aesthetics. The film sets the tone perfectly for how odd it will be in the first scene, Lenny Baker as a female fortune teller Sonja in a cramped, claustrophobic room where the table is actually revolving in space in from of the camera and the dialogue she utters to the lead protagonist has a cryptic, slurred quality to it.

The underground environments, thanks to the work of future architects Richard Stange and Alan Johnson with various craftspeople and artists, are the most rewarding aspect of the whole film, fully artificial and surreal environments entirely made from junk, where a lot of red installation foam, popcorn bags and various pieces of debris make up living art installations where extras roam about whining, babbling, eating prop meat and even burst into traditional American songbook pieces. An upside down, plastic cup toothed Volkswagen on chains as a swing. A room full of dolls. A blood draining machine, corpse grinder hybrid that looks like it was made from papier-mâché. Creations that are deliberately artificial but work some perfectly in terms of being deliberately out-there whilst being made of tangible materials, Michel Gondry is he went through an evil period, the textual nature to it all, in dank waterlogged rooms or the cavernous, multi-floor areas of the underground, adding to the mystery and sense of scale to the cannibal's home in a lo-fi, high art style. Adding to this madness is the psychoacoustic noises created by Dr. Sheridan D. Speeth to induce subliminal fear into the viewer. These noises aren't subtle in the slightest, atonal drones that rear up in the soundtrack clearly, but they add to the cacophony of screams and cryptic dialogue onscreen without becoming an audiovisual mess, instead being appropriate unnerving.

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

One of the greatest appeals to American exploitation cinema, as the sequel to Arrow Video's American Horror Project set is something I'm in dire need of even above major films getting a release from them, is a unique style to them that is as distinct and rewarding as Italian horror cinema is for me too. The mix of realism in cast and locations, even amateur casting and less than perfect set choices, combined with characters actors in prominent roles - William Preston with a distinct glass eye and greenish-grey pancake makeup as the deranged litter picking ghoul or Jerome Dempsey as Mr. Blood, Malatesta's underling who runs the theme park and realises flamboyant dialogue whilst managing to still have dignity entering a scene in a dodgem car.

The result's a verisimilitude balanced with unpredictability, where even after multiple rewatches a loopiness to the film stays that's infectious, all the while the solid foundation of interest characters and character actor performances keeps the film afloat. The naturalism goes as far as all the damage the surviving print restoration that's permanently scarred the film, eccentricity dripping off it including possibly the most spoilt, moody child in horror cinema who demands a rubber chicken from the shooting gallery stand only to throw it to the floor immediately afterwards, or someone making the ill-advised decision to ride a rollercoaster late at night by themselves by way of unexpected decapitation. The screenplay by Werner Liepolt is also appropriately off-kilter, particularly its grabbing of the kind of material usually found from a gothic movie such as Malatesta as the cape wearing debonair man who possesses many faces, including one to induce madness in others, alongside the various fragments of vampirism included in the eccentric cannibals' behaviour, wooden stakes being waved cheatingly and blood being drained from victims.

Personal Opinion:

Slowly growing into a personal favourite. Openly admitting that its ramshackle at times, this is yet the kind of oddity from the US in the seventies that, with some legitimately good technical and story tale qualities, I can appreciate for its strange results but as much for what it does so well.

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Children of the Living Dead (2001)

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Director: Tor Ramsey

Screenplay: Karen Lee Wolf

Cast: Marty Schiff (as Deputy Randolph); Damien Luvara (as Matthew Michaels); Jamie McCoy (as Laurie Danesi); Sam Nicotero (as Dusty); Tom Savini (as Deputy Hughes)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #80

I had prepared for the worst. The various spin-offs, rip-offs, remakes and various unofficial sequels to George A. Romero's Living Dead series is a convoluted one; for the cool Italian ones and Return of the Living Dead franchise, you also get the two attempts by producer John A. Russo, co-writer and star of Night of the Living Dead (1968), one a 30th anniversary reinterpretation of that film with next footage and Children of the Living Dead, a film so obscure it's permanently second hand now. Acquiring a mucky second hand DVD whose box was stained with a mysterious purple mark at the bottom I can't explain the origins of. Having to suffer through the film, possibly blameable on a sausage roll I eat hours earlier, with a brief stomach illness that was awful in itself to suffer through. All signs of ripping into the film but, even if this review is still going to tarnish Children of the Living Dead as a dreadful movie, I wasn't expecting this to have some form of technical competency as it did. I was expecting the worst even in technical quality, not something which can actually be compared to a film like J. R. Bookwalter's The Dead Next Door (1989) rather than one of the Romero films.

Certainly the prologue, an actual zombie outbreak when the rest of the film could've been a supernatural horror instead to the point of absurdity, tries its hardest at first to have some ambition. Tom Savini as a survivalist badass, pyrotechnic effects and a car exploding, even a helicopter in the air and an aerial shot of a couple of extras in a field. It's still sluggish in performances and presentation but it offered hope of a little quality, like The Dead Next Door trying for more than what's possible with small resources and giving a stab at something entertaining and rewarding...

...which never comes to pass afterwards. Despite people from the original Living Dead franchise being involved, even Hollywood composer Alan Howarth involved, something like The Dead Next Door influenced by Romero's films is so much more better than this, so higher in bar of quality it's added some greater admiration for Bookwalter's work now, the only positive I'll give Children of the Living Dead for the rest of the review. Jumping forward constantly in time at first to the point of ridiculousness, it's convoluted narrative wise for a uber-low budget feature, a serial killer story where the central villain, mass murderer Abbot Hayes (A. Barrett Worland), manages to come back from the grave in the late eighties during a zombie outbreak and, decades later, enslaves adults he once kidnapped as children, when he was already undead, as his zombie slaves.

At first I expected this to top Romero, with Diary of the Dead (2007), by beating him by six years to having obnoxious young adult leads in the centre but an inordinate amount of time is given to characters who merely become background grunts to pick off side characters through the rest of the movie. (Admittedly it was impressive that they pushed a real van off a cliff for their deaths, but that doesn't prepare you for how pointless their entire existence was even as the friends of the real female lead). A lot of the film turns into an economic drama with added zombies, where the old graveyard is losing business only, when the owner gets munched, to be taken over by a car dealership whose construction workers have no qualms in just taking the old coffins out and putting them in a mass grave under concrete at the side, as if this was going to be a prequel to a Poltergeist-like narrative. Instead all this plot is merely for a snail's pace and a lot of scenes of less than stellar actors to talk to each other for a lot of the running time.

As mentioned the zombies are more background objects that occasionally pop up to bite someone's neck. As much as this type of low budget horror cinema can be rewarding for their eccentricities, accidental cinema verité and interesting characters - the closest thing to one of these virtues found in Sam Nicotero's former grave robber turned hotel manager Dusty - that only works when the characters or the dialogue is memorable. That Tom Savini, the ony other virtue in terms of characters, vanishes after the end of the prologue means you're stuck with a look of wooden, laborious scenes. The film drags on until eventually it ends abruptly, with no conclusion and merely a laborious shoot-out in a diner, so contrived that hilariously the cops and mob brought in to save the persons inside, rather than staying outside and circling the zombies from a distance, all enter said diner trapping themselves and increasing their chances of being picked off. It's no way near as bad as I was expecting it, but that's not a compliment to Children of the Living Dead baring that I've a likely chance of finding much worse zombie films based or ripping off Romero's work than this, which is not a prospect I have excitement for considering this one.

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Don't Breathe (2016)

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Director: Fede Alvarez

Screenplay: Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues

Cast: Jane Levy (as Rocky); Stephen Lang (as Norman Nordstrom); Dylan Minnette (as Alex); Daniel Zovatto (as Money)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #79

[MAJOR SPOILERS THROUGHOUT]

Don't Breathe being placed within the "Horror" category is, barring one subplot, somewhat debatable. The grey area with this subject is that, whilst Don't Breathe is a Thriller, that genre itself has always been misused as a genre description and has so many sub-genres within it that bleed into the same areas of Horror does as there are many that don't. For those films in the Thriller genre that are about crime, conspiracies etc. this is not applicable, the sort of films the older term Suspense was appropriate for, but those smaller scale, slow burn films usually set at night or with fear and tension involved start to slide into the same territory as Horror, only that the fear is found in ordinary reality and other people. In Don't Breathe, this sense of terror is found within context which is not usually horror based as three robbers (Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette and Daniel Zovatto) attempt to steal from the home of a blind war veteran Norman Nordstrom (Stephen Lang) only for it to backfire, horror to be found in how, even if his blindness, Nordstrom is still dangerous and has an advantage in his own home of his sense of hearing being heightened and how having no eyes is far more an advantage for him than for the three robbers to have sight, especially female lead Rocky (Levy), when there is no light in the dark house.

After the frankly overrated, terrible Evil Dead remake from 2013, this is a significant step-up in quality for director/co-writer Fede Alvarez. A lot of this is because the premise, where characters have to move quietly around a hostile environment against a resourceful and strong individual, forces the film to slow down, even at eight five minutes or so, taking its time to a virtue to let tension build up. If Don't Breathe was just a Thriller which followed the initial premise it would've been great, of three people being trapped in a person's house unprepared, and his pet Rottweiler another obstacle, can bring out a great deal of tension. This is particularly the case as Alvarez can still be as flashy as he was as a director in the Evil Dead remake but with the right material for it to not be obnoxious but add to the mood greatly. One main location in the house is turned into a claustrophobic labyrinth of basement and between wall routes for characters to try to escape through, and when there are key set pieces this style adds to their significance, the biggest and best when Nordstrom takes advantage of his blindness, a scene in the total dark shot with a special camera depicting the sequence in stark white light with the actor's eyes like giant, swollen pupils without irises.

The film fails for me however with its plot twist where, when it's built up how the blind vet lost his daughter in a hit-and-run accident, he kidnapped the female driver responsible and artificially impregnated her, keeping her in the basement until she could sire a new daughter before he'd release her. It's a plot twist which inherently places him as the villain, as disturbing in implication and trigger warnings as you can get, but it's also so completely out of place within this particularly film and the rest of the content. Also, while this loaded twist immediately places Rocky as the sympathetic lead, especially as she is about to fall foul of the same horrible event by way of what appears to be a turkey baser to add to its grisliness, it's a bizarre paradox of a tasteless and transgressive plot twist that however neuters the film's central moral conflict by making Stephen Lang an obvious villain.

If it wasn't for this twist, Don't Breathe would've had a far more complex, and more rewarding, issue in its tale of three morally duplicitous individuals, who are attempting to commit crime so Rocky can escape with her young daughter from a terrible home life, but still do so by robbing an innocent and blind war veteran. By placing the gruesome plot twist in it both negates the potential for more complexity to this stylist thriller and actually reveals a lack of character dimension to Jane Levy's Rocky, both in a merely adequate performance from the actor and the issue in terms of the character as a fully formed or at least interest figure the film mostly hangs on emotionally. Were it not for two things bookmarking the events that happen to Rocky, one brief sole sequence of her terrible home life with an alcoholic mother and aggressive step father that's never mentioned again, and the plot twist and how she's in the same terrible position as the last women in Nordstrom's basement, the character is not actually likable, only sympathetic due to script additions that 1) give her a daughter that brings inherent sympathy and 2) write in the implications of sexual violence that would immediately place a female character as a sympathetic victim whether or not the screenplay could actually justify the later in good taste or whether either addition is actually done well or not. Hence, Don't Breathe is certainly a step up in quality, but Fede Alvarez really doesn't deserve the praise he's had until he stops letting these crass broad strokes effect his films like the first two.

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Halloween 2 (2009)

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Director: Rob Zombie

Screenplay: Rob Zombie

Cast: Scout Taylor-Compton (as Laurie Strode); Brad Dourif (as Sheriff Lee Brackett); Malcolm McDowell (as Dr. Samuel Loomis); Tyler Mane (as Michael Myers); Danielle Harris (as Annie Brackett); Sheri Moon Zombie (as Deborah Myers); Chase Wright Vanek (as Young Michael); Brea Grant (as Mya Rockwell); Angela Trimbur (as Harley David)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #78

[Minor Spoilers Ahead]

With this I've finally finished the Halloween franchise, feeling that it's better to start with the lengthy retrospective now before the review of the final film. Barring The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) and Resurrection (2002), all of them have been rewarding in some way, where sequels I found dreary on the first viewing being more rewarding now and for all the cringe worthy moments within them - death by hot tub in Part II (1981), the music cues in general in Part V: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989), the entire subplot of Laurie Strode being Michael Myer's sister in the non Rob Zombie films - all of them have something of worth to like. Even as someone who realised, within viewing this series, I'm not the biggest slasher fan as I thought I was turning into, this franchise was ultimately rewarding to sit through without it falling into mediocrity or worse into the later sequels.

Until the new sequel that's been discussed in film gossip actually materialised, stuck within the same development hell since 2009 as Friday the 13th has since the same year, almost all the Halloween films follow a two film cycle in hindsight. The exceptions are Part III: Season of the Witch (1982), a film I love but as an attempt to change the series into a different genre at too late a time should've been its own film, and The Curse of Michael Myers, made when the slasher genre had died and itself dead on arrival with the severity of the theatrical cut's changes to the shot footage*.

The first Halloween in 1978 is an unarguable classic, one that I had to slow warm to but eventually did, able to stand by itself but with Halloween II a visible twin, the original an influence on the eighties slasher boom but the first sequel having to catch up with what the imitators were starting whilst retaining its original style and naturalism in the dialogue, the irony found in a film in the eighties set the same night as the first film made in the late seventies. Parts IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) and V, in their own world, reflect the late eighties with their warm bright autumn colours rather than neon and terrible hairstyles and, in spite of their more dumber moments, manage to have a melancholic, gorgeous aesthetic to them that affirm my opinion of Halloween being one of the classier horror franchises in existence. H20 (1998), after Scream (1996) brought the sub-genre back to life like Lazarus, reflected a new mature take on the genre as well as its tongue-in-cheek whit only to lead to Resurrection, mirroring how the sub-genre died again a very painful death involving Busta Rhymes kung-fu kicking Michael Myers. Then finally there's the Rob Zombie remakes, in 2007 and 2009, critically divisive and incredibly flawed but idiosyncratic, especially the sequel I've reviewing here, to the point that I have to admire them.

Halloween 2, Zombie's, is a lot more messier than I remember it to be, certainly with as many flaws as it's prequel had, but controversially for some slasher purists I have to say it's one of the better sequels in the series for how drastically different it is. It finds a more careful balance between the carnivalesque tone and the extreme violence of the previous Zombie film and a lot of the flaws come from having to follow the first part only. I had avoided the 2007 Halloween until now because of how critically panned it was, yet had seen this 2009 sequel because of how unconventional some of its content was said to be and how it manages to get some acclaim from critics. Seeing it for the first time as a sequel is strange in how I had completely disconnected aspects of the prequel. On one hand, it would be perversely absurd how the same event happens to Danielle Harris' character twice, the same way, in both films if they weren't as disturbing and bloody as they were, emotionally devastating in the sequel now Harris is allow more screen time to be a sympathetic character. However for the most part seeing them connected means flaws of the first part of mostly improved upon, to the point that it redeems the first to some extent, even redeeming things from previous sequels in this now openly appropriated ideas from other versions of these characters for its own means. The biggest is how these films took the issue of Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) being Michael Myers' sister and made them part of the two films from the beginning, still removing some of the potential horror of the premise, but improved next to other sequels before because this film builds to the weight of psychological damage added to that Laurie already has. Even if it crowbars in the psychic link in this film, which gets discarded for the most part, from other sequels between the characters it a significant attempt to make this plot point more meaningful, the only other time this attempt was done found in H20.

Going as far as use the premise of the original Halloween II, Myers stalking Laurie in a hospital, only to show it was only a traumatic nightmare of hers in the first thirty minutes, this film is purposely dissecting aspects from all the others and reinterpreting them, in ways that would upset some viewers but for me were almost all of reward or at least interest. Myers being terrifying without the William Shatner mask is a brave move in itself as it showed the character could still exist even if you drastically change his visual appearance. The attempt at greater emotional depth are admirable from Zombie in particular as well. Even if it's less subtle than H20, Jamie Lee Curtis a better actor than Taylor-Compton, and playing an older female character with world weariness and quiet reflections to play within the performance, it's still a brave and successful move to this character into one who is at times unlikable in her outbursts but is always sympathetic knowing why this is the case, even with the exaggerated expletive ridden dialogue a figure with moments of vulnerability and happiness you can't help but be sympathetic to. It's a little strange still for Rob Zombie to try to write these alt-culture female characters, sometimes broad when he has Laurie and her new friends jam out to Kick Out the Jams by MC5, but it's actually a blessing, rather than the figures of many eighties slasher films that are frankly paper cut-outs, to have the kind of young women I actually grew up with as a teenager and fell in love with up to the present day, not the bland portraits of white bread final girls and women but miscreants and bold figures with personalities, their clothes and piercings as much reflective of their personalities as their ability to express themselves without censorship. This is important as well as this actually allows the horror of Zombie's depiction of violence, now these characters have an entire film to be shown, to have actual pain to them when you've followed them throughout the narrative.

This applies in general to the whole cast. Zombie helps in terms of the characterisation in limiting the cameos drastically from the first film and, if still using music and pop culture that's recognisable, making it more obscure and diverse so that it'll have affect on people who don't recognise the songs as more part of the emotional tenor of the scene. With the later, he scores one of the best music and visual cues of the franchise by turning a black and white TV performance of Nights in White Satin by The Moody Blues into a haunting warning of death. For the former it means that the two most recognisable faces in the film - Malcolm McDowell and Brad Dourif, get a lot of meat to their stories. McDowell gets to continue on with what's a drastic change to the Dr. Loomis character but one that makes sense to this world, where his failure in helping Myers turns him further into a money grabbing celebrity figure, his place in the film in the sidelines (and inexplicably on a talk show with Weird Al Yankovic as himself) making sense as a narrative tangent in how he has to redeem himself. As for Dourif, what was merely a cameo in the first film is now a great character actor becoming a main character, giving a gravity to his role that only a great actor like him can provide.

This isn't forgetting that Halloween 2 is also a bizarre film. Legitimately strange as a horror sequel goes, going so far from the mould of the previous films that the first implication of this change, a stray cow standing in the midst of the road allowing a character to escape, is fairly normal next to everything else. Now having watched all the sequels in order, the sight of Zombie becoming Tim Burton for a brief moment and show a young Michael Myers in front of a Alice in Wonderland table of pumpkin headed royalty is something unfathomable next to the others. One of the biggest issues with whether you like slashers or not is how they have very repetitive plots, making something as drastically different as this film's tone alien in comparison to most of the sub-genre Even if it gets silly at points, Sherri Moon Zombie as a Goth Lolita kewpie doll pulling along a Freudian white horse, this is the part that cements a lot of the virtues of this film by how far it stays away from everything before and works. Rather than vileness and death, which plagued the prequel, this strangeness spilling out into the film, while abrupt in context of the more grounded first film, allows the director to both bring a sense of greater personality onscreen and also allow his more carnivalesque tendencies to make sense. Here, it makes sense when it would've failed in another Halloween sequel to stage possibly one of the greatest Halloween parties possible in context of the sequel's tone as a central sequence, it's mix of silent films projected on walls, psychobilly music and characters dressed as Rocky Horror Picture Show figures able to work in tone here whilst intercutting to the more nastier moments inbetween the party.

This sense of taking risk, even though I now like most of the straightforward films in the Halloween franchise, is ultimately why I have to appreciate this one higher than others, both the risk at emotional drama and its oddness. The result is still messy and can lunge from tangent especially in the finale, still having to rely on the deeply flawed 2007 film, but I have to applaud its best moments. Until a new sequel eventually appears, whenever that actually is, this is best way to have ended so far with not being a bog standard slasher film but someone distinct in the director's chair taking a chance. If that new sequel ever takes place, it's now going to be interesting after Rob Zombie's two attempts whether it's going to overcome the obstacle of being as memorable as those films or turn out to be conventional or dull, John Carpenter being involved or not.

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* If the original producer's cut was more easily available in the UK, I'd gladly give Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers another shot however.

Alps (2011)

From http://www.altcine.com/posters/
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Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Screenplay: Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou

Cast: Aris Servetalis (as the Ambulance Medic); Johnny Vekris (as the Coach); Ariane Labed (as the Gymnast); Angeliki Papoulia (as the Nurse); Stavros Psyllakis (as the Nurse's father)

Synopsis: In modern day Greece, a small group of people - an emergency ambulance medic (Servetalis), a gymnast (Labed) and her couch (Vekris), and a nurse (Papoulia) - decide to create a service where they act like surrogates of the recently passed away for bereaving families and loved ones. The boundaries start to blur when the Nurse, becoming obsessed with a female tennis prodigy, decides to be her surrogate when she dies for her parents without informing the rest of the group.

At this point Yorgos Lanthimos is one of my favourite working directors. Still in his prime, which gives me hope for the future for a long career, even his English language debut The Lobster (2015), when other non-English directors have stumbled with Hollywood a-list casts and English dialogue, felt like he didn't have to change anything about his style at all and actually forced the outside influences to follow his viewpoint instead. Dogtooth (2009) was a significant milestone in modern Greek cinema outside the country at least from my perspective, awakening an interest in a new wave of films  from Greece with naturalistic minimalism in the look of the films but an interest in the surreal, but whilst his style matches other films like Chevalier (2015), Lanthimos especially now has a clear auteurist style of his own. His ability to transition to English and a Hollywood cast was incredibly easy for him because his work is all about an alien take of mundanity at its most farcical, taking ordinary life, especially conversations, and distilling them down until they are utterly strange, the actions and behaviour of his characters mundane in real life turned into something inherently bizarre.

Alps seamlessly fits between Dogtooth and The Lobster as the more quiet of an unofficial trilogy, dealing with a various philosophical topic of death like The Lobster dealt with the nature of romance and love, like the other two films using idiosyncratic little details in characters' behaviour and exaggerating them until they are absurd. How the gymnast's desire to become better is filter edthrough wanting to transition from classical to pop. How what one's work place mug for hot drinks or who their favourite actor dictates who that person is as an individual. In lieu to a film about people having to become the deceased, learning as much about them to pose as the love one as if death has not happened, the idea that a person can be charted as an individual by whether they like Jude Law or Brad Pitt becomes pertinent in Lanthimos' constant, prevailing obsession with how human beings act in a modern society, whether it's one created within a home with no knowledge of the outside world like in Dogtooth or this world in Alps where there's more freedom but characters needing rituals to function.

The rituals spike into more perplexing aspects which are done as part of said ritual, such as punishing a surrogate for failing at their work by forcing them to hang upside down repeating a phrase they use for a certain client. Not surprisingly the relationship between the surrogate and client breaks down but it's the customers who instigate this disintegration first. As the rituals become more complicated - a blind woman getting two surrogates, playing her late husband and a female friend of hers, to pretend to cheat on her - you also get sexual relationships which the leader the Medic prohibits. Eventually as well the Nurse 's actions, taking on clients without anyone else's knowledge, takes power away from the Medic which he reacts to severely when he finds out.

Lanthimos is also interesting in these films with how hierarchies of rules dictate people and how inevitably someone will transgress against them - one of the daughters in Dogtooth going against the rules to find out what's in the outside world, or Colin Farrell in The Lobster rejecting the rules of mandatory relationships to join the electronic music listening, anti-romantics in the woodland. Here in Alps, the Medic is a man who wants to help people but clearly, from the scene when he decides to create the surrogate group, has an ego and a desire to be a leader, lashing out in the sole scene of violence common in Lanthimos' films when his power is threatened. The rebellious Nurse is visibly trying to fill a void in herself by becoming the teenage tennis player, going as far as creating a mind bending meta moment when she introduces the late girl's boyfriend to her father.

Technical Detail:

Lanthimos follows the conventions of modern world cinema - slow paced scenes, static camera shots with minimal movement of the camera, the lack of scores and use of diagetic music, natural on-set locations - but he has managed to make it his own distinct style because his use of mundanity for surreal deadpan is perfectly matched by said cinematic style. Deadpan in the appropriate term for his films, but what's also important is that, for that to work, Lanthimos is usually dark humoured in his work, the minimal naturalistic tone working because the humour has a caustic existentialism to it. Capable of being more fantastical, as The Lobster proves, Lanthimos is yet someone who can quickly cut to more disturbing aspects of human beings even if the moments of violence can be sickly hilarious, the realistic look of his films emphasising this.

Abstract Spectrum: Surreal/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

As someone, due to a learning disability since birth, who has a distance to other people, which has led for all my struggles to it also to virtues like finding human behaviour in others absurd including that which is accepted as conventional social interaction, Lanthimos taps into something that immediately makes sense to me now and allows me to appreciate his work, of how people as social figures are more constructions and how absurd this is from a distance. He takes behaviour through the scripts of his films to an extreme of bland conversations and normal activities being abstracted. What would be rational and insignificant behaviour in another film turns into something more weird here.

Alps is a lot more subdued than Dogtooth or The Lobster, as barring an oddly sensual tone, not just the surrogate relationships -  such as the man who asks for a surrogate of a separated female lover to argue in second language English together and play a woman with diabetes, or the parents of the tennis prodigy suggesting the Nurse meets her "boyfriend" again - but even amongst the surrogates themselves, there's little of the extreme violence and more transgressive aspects of Dogtooth. Moments instead stand out are more casually strange, such as the game of impersonations of dead celebrities that reveals the Medic as a closet Bruce Lee fan, two people role-playing an argument in a lamp store etc., the subdued nature of Alps instead offering a different side of the same themes Lanthimos has tackled before and after.

Personal Opinion:

Somewhat lost in the shuffle between Lanthimos' two films before and after it, which I can attest to having only seen it now, but that doesn't detract from it being a great middle piece of a nice, loosely themed trilogy of movies. Knowing the director-writer is only just in his peak in popularity, with more films likely in the future, and even switching to the English language not affecting him, it adds a (strangely) good vibe to the likes of Alps more.

From https://screengrabsaz.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/01-181.jpg