The Godfathers of Hardcore (2017): written and directed by Ian McFarland, co-written by Tony Fernandez; featuring Roger Miret and Vinnie Stigma of Agnostic Front: Fascinating documentary on seminal New York Hardcore Punk band Agnostic Front, still touring and recording now after 35 years in the business. The film focuses on founding guitarist Vinnie Stigma and current (for at least 25 years) lead vocalist Roger Miret.
Stigma is fascinating and outspoken. It's Miret who does all the stuff that keeps the band going in terms of bookings and financial work, however, and his self-imposed overwork seems to lead to a heart attack documented late in the film.
But he keeps on going -- as the film notes, Agnostic Front had played over 400 shows between the completion of filming and the release of the movie, all this after Miret had a wireless heart monitor implanted to monitor his still undiagnosed heart problem. Makes a fine bookend to Crave's 2019 4-part PUNK miniseries. Recommended.
Body Double (1984): written by Brian De Palma and Robert J. Avrech; directed by Brian De Palma; starring Craig Wasson (Jake), Melanie Griffith (Holly), Gregg Henry (Sam), and Deborah Shelton (Gloria):
It's hard to believe now that Body Double was condemned as immoral and horrible and all that jazz back in 1984, primarily because of a scene in which a woman is killed with a giant drill. Of course, De Palma shoots this scene so that we never see the drill go through the woman. People reacted to what they thought they saw, and to what was implied. People also reacted to the film's use of porn films in its narrative. Well, and the fact that Body Double is De Palma's love letter to all things Hitchcock, and Vertigo in particular. But the violence now looks quaint. Body Double is less violent than a typical episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
It's also a love letter to Hollywood and movie-making and actors. Craig Wasson is perfectly cast as a somewhat nebbishy Every-actor who gets pulled into a murder investigation because of his voyeurism, and soon demonstrates that he might be The World's Greatest Detective.
Melanie Griffith generated most of the positive buzz for the movie in her role as Holly Body, the porn star who soon becomes key to Wasson solving the mystery of who killed his neighbour (with the aforementioned drill), and why. Griffith is terrific -- it really was a star-making performance.
I don't know that this is De Palma's best movie, but it's his most purely enjoyable. Is it misogynistic? I don't know. Less so than Hollywood (or Western culture) was in 1984, probably. For the sake of comparison, Hitchcock killed two female characters in Vertigo in the late 1950's. De Palma kills one, and she actually gets avenged in the course of the movie. Radical. Highly recommended.
DePalma (2015): directed by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow; starring Brian De Palma as himself: A 100-minute interview with Brian De Palma takes the viewer on a survey of his life and film-making career. De Palma is a tremendously entertaining and opinionated film-maker. Even non-fans of his work might find this film fascinating. And if you do like De Palma's work, it's a gold-mine of opinions and anecdotes and observations. Highly recommended.
Pearl Harbor: The Accused (2016) This HBO documentary does an awfully good job of absolving disgraced four-star admiral and Commander in Chief US Pacific Fleet Pearl Husband Edward Kimmel of responsibility for that Day of Infamy. Indeed, it does such a good job of doing so that the only explanation for the actions and inactions of US Naval Chief of Operations from 1939-1942 Harold Rainsford Stark is that Stark was a member of the time-altering lunatics of Rittenhouse on TV's Timeless.
Kimmel's grand-children continue to fight for his official absolution, but while a Senate Resolution absolving him of responsibility was passed in 1999, Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama have refused to sign that Resolution, thus leaving Kimmel's honour in official limbo. It's really an astonishing story. Recommended.
Spielberg (2017): directed by Susan Lacy: Earnest HBO hagiography of Steven Spielberg dishes almost no dirt, almost no critiques of his work, and almost no mentions of the writers who wrote many of his finest movies. Welcome to Hollywood Auteurism 101.
It's nonetheless an often engaging film, especially as it lays out Spielberg's childhood and the increasingly strained and then broken relationship of his mother and father that led to Spielberg being estranged from his father for more than a decade. Don't look for a discussion of Always, though. Lightly recommended.
Office Space (1999): written and directed by Mike Judge; starring Ron Livingston (Peter), Jennifer Aniston (Joanna), David Herman (Michael), Ajay Naidu (Samir), Diedrich Bader (Lawrence), Stephen Root (Milton), and Gary Cole (Bill Lumbergh): Mike Judge's cult favourite about the dehumanizing effects of office work remains a mostly masterpiece nearly 20 years later. Now as then, only the limp, comedy-killing dishrag that is Jennifer Aniston in romantic comedies strikes a sour note. Otherwise, the cast and writing are impeccable. Nearly highly recommended (Damn you, Aniston!).
Deli Man (2014): written and directed by Erik Anjou: Thoroughly enjoyable documentary about the rise and fall of the Jewish deli in North America (well, Canada and the United States, anyway). Extremely tasty and surprisingly nourishing, though Montreal is a no-show (but Toronto does show up). The story of present-day Deli Man Ziggy Gruber, who "co-owns a large deli in Houston and is also the grandson of the original owner of the Rialto Deli, the first Kosher deli to open on Broadway in New York City in the 1920s," (IMDB) unifies the documentary's narrative. He's an interesting fella. Highly recommended.
Becoming Cary Grant (2017): written and directed by Mark Kidel and Nick Ware: While this documentary gets a bit too arty at times (and could use a lot more captioning to explain who people are in photographs and home-movie clips), it's still a captivating look at the life and work of Cary Grant (born Archie Leach in England). While there are interviews with critics, historians, friends, and family members, most of the heavy lifting is done by Jonathan Pryce reading sections from Grant's never-published autobiography. It's fascinating stuff, augmented by the fact that Grant found success in LSD-aided therapy. Recommended.
Morgan (2016): written by Seth Owen; directed by Luke Scott; starring Kate Mara (Lee Weathers), Anya Taylor-Joy (Morgan), Rose Leslie (Amy), Toby Jones (Ziegler), Paul Giamatti (Shapiro), Michelle Yeoh (Dr. Cheng), and Boyd Holbrook (Skip): Or, Ex Machina for Dummies. Nothing in this 'AI seeks to escape its creators by any means necessary' film makes much sense if examined too closely, from the convenient;y breakable glass skylight in the AI's cell to the idea that a major corporation would have scientists developing super-dangerous, super-expensive super-soldiers without having lots of supervision and security on-site. Kate Mara elevates the material with her performance as a security wetwork specialist sent to clean things up at the rustic mansion of a lab, as does Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch) as the eponymous Morgan. But it's pretty dumb, though it marks the directorial debut of Ridley Scott's son, Luke. Not recommended.
The Deep by Nick Cutter [Craig Davidson] (2015): Nick Cutter, the horror-writing pseudonym of mainstream Canadian writer Craig Davidson, became a James-Herbert-Award-winning nom-de-plume with the horror novel The Troop (2013). The Deep is the follow-up, with a jacket design that mimics that of The Troop despite their lack of similarities. Well, they're both mainly set on, under, or near water. So there you go.
A new disease nicknamed "The 'Gets'" (from "Forget") is ravaging humanity. Victims go from being forgetful to forgetting how to breathe in a matter of months. But through a series of events I'm not going to summarize, scientists discover that the cure for The Gets may exist at the deepest part of the ocean floor, in the Marianas Trench. So about a gazillion dollars goes into building an underwater science lab and an above-water support base. Three scientists go down. Things get weird. Communications fail. Underwater disturbances make it impossible to get back down to the station to investigate. One scientist comes up, dead and horribly mutilated.
So the authorities, at the request of a cryptic radio message from one of the two surviving scientists, round up his estranged brother, a divorced veterinarian whose only son disappeared without a trace a few years earlier. The vet doesn't know why his brother would have summoned him -- they haven't spoken in eight years and were never close to begin with. The brother down below is a super-genius (and a bit of a sociopath). Has their relationship changed? Are all great scientists in horror novels sociopaths?
Only one way to find out -- so down we go, eight miles down, to the Trieste underwater laboratory and the mysteries within and without.
As in The Troop, The Deep's strengths lie in fast-twitch plotting and an exuberantly hyper-caffeinated approach to the synthesis of its horror influences. Cutter doesn't invent new horrors, but he does throw so many old ones at the reader in sometimes strikingly odd combinations that the effect is often one of horror born of a startling novelty of contrast.
To cite one example, The Deep presents scenes of horrified claustrophobia that riff on antecedents such as John Carpenter's version of The Thing, Alien, and a host of other works that present isolated people under siege by Terrible Things. But in the midst of this, scenes reminiscent of Stephen King's "The Boogeyman" suddenly break out. And then we're plunged into a backstory of the abused childhoods of the vet and his brother. And then back to a new supernatural or science-fictional horror. And for the bulk of the novel, this sort of on-going juxtaposition of science-fictional, supernatural, and psychological horror actually works.
Unfortunately, the engine blows up with about 100 pages to go. The novel seems to lose sight of its above-water McGuffin, The Gets, which have never been fully developed as a threat to humanity. Indeed, the novel could have functioned quite well without The Gets, given how under-developed and under-shown this plague is. Cutter's synthetic horror cavalcade begins to replicate the content of his influences too closely, with a scene lifted almost verbatim from Carpenter's The Thing being just one example. There's also a lengthy bit involving mutated honeybees that's a weak riff on George R.R. Martin's "Sandkings." And a riff on a bit from Stephen King's "The Raft" that gets used once too often. A lovable dog also wears out its welcome.
These failures might have been survivable had the last fifty pages not degenerated into Basil Exposition's Nude House of Wacky Body Horror. We finally learn the secrets of what has really been going on. Well, sort of. But we learn these things from anthropomorphized antagonists who cackle and snark like the bitchiest of Joss Whedon's bitchy Big Bads. We get a very, very old science-fictional and horror trope as an explanation for the horror's existence in the Marianas Trench. We get about 40 pages of Cutter doing a bad imitation of Laird Barron, one with neither menace nor wit but only a gushy, goopy tide of bodily atrocities. We get a damp squib of an ending. We get characters behaving as stupidly and helplessly as characters can act. The end.
Oh, for a couple of flame-throwers or a convenient nuclear bomb. They too would be borrowings, but they'd be welcome borrowings. Nuke the sight from orbit. Absolutely goddamned right.
Oh, well. The Deep really is a page-turner for 80% of its not-inconsiderable length. However, if you're one of those people who get annoyed by tiny, short little chapters in the manner of The Da Vinci Code or a novel meant for fourth-graders, steer clear. These are some of the shortest chapters you're ever going to encounter in a novel aimed at adults. Lightly recommended.
The Blair Witch Project Dossier by D.A. Stern and others (1999): As with the In Search of... style 'documentary' that promoted The Blair Witch Project on the SciFi and Space Channels when the movie came out in 1999, this book is better than the movie it promotes. The Blair Witch Project Dossier comprises fake newspaper articles, interview transcripts, historical records, photos, period illustrations, and hand-written letters and journals. It's old-school documentary horror of which Poe or Lovecraft might have approved.
There's real wit here, whether in a name-check of one of Lovecraft's creepy backwoods characters or in subtle and fascinating implications dotted throughout the historical portions of the text. These things suggest a horror much larger and older than that which we see in the movie. They also offer a context for the scenes in the house that makes the events of the movie seem even worse. However, no explanation is offered for why those two bozos are fishing in two inches of water. Recommended.
Paranormal Activity 3, written by Christopher B. Landon, based on characters and situations created by Oren Peli, starring Chloe Csengery (Katie), Jessica Tyler Brown (Kristi), Lauren Bittner (Julie), and Dustin Ingram (Randy Rosen) (2011): The 'documentary/found footage' subgenre of horror films, so popular right now, harks back to the 19th-century beginnings of what we now recognize as the horror story. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was told in the form of letters and diary entries; Bram Stoker's Dracula added fake newspaper clippings to that mix; Edgar Allan Poe played with fiction and fact within stories that were sometimes published as 'fact.'
H.P. Lovecraft moved the documentary style in a more holistic fictional direction, having his narrators tell ostensibly true tales about fictional events and mythologies and framing everything inside the conceit that the fiction was the real truth about the universe, and recognized fact the fiction.
I have a great fondness for these attempts at documentary horror -- at their best, they're much better than almost every other filmed attempt at horror in the last twenty or thirty years, in part because they move so resolutely away from the grapohic violence of the slasher films that have dominated the horror film genre since the late 1970's. Suggestion and subtlety are what work best in these movies, and Paranormal Activity 3 comes up with some lovely moments of 'found' horror.
The fictional backstory of the three Paranormal films situates the entire narrative within the subtext of long-term child sexual, physical and emotional abuse, abuse that spans generations and is part of the horror. It's a classic example of Stephen King's 'sub-text school' of horror, in which the supernatural stands in for something too mundanely awful to be depicted on film.
Thankfully, one can also say 'pooh!' to sub-text and simply enjoy the movies as a depiction of the pervasive and perhaps unkillable influence of supernatural evil. That the threatened protagonists are spiritually and intellectually unsuited to a confrontation with elemental and generational evil is part of the point of the movies, I think -- no one is coming to save them because they're too dumb, or too conditioned to an unintellectual passivity, to make any real effort to save themselves. They're reactive, not pro-active.
I won't bother with the plot of the movie, or even the characterization. It all makes more sense if you've seen the first two films, though if you haven't you may be a lot more shocked at some of the plot developments. There is clever, killer use of a camera mounted on a rotating fan within the story world, with menace building as we move at a set pace back and forth from foyer to dining room and back again, and things start to appear that shouldn't be there.
There's also one of the smarter, more realistic character reactions to a haunting that I've seen in some time -- a secondary character seems to have seen Eddie Murphy's hilarious bit about The Amityville Horror and reacts accordingly when threatening weirdness occurs. Highly recommended.
