(Simon Boyes & Adam Mason, 2006)
The opening of this film does not fuck about. We get a brief glimpse into the everyday life of the main character (just enough to establish that she’s a single mother) and then we’re dumped straight into the heart of horror-central, as she wakes up in a wooden box with no indication how she got there.* A day later, she is freed from the box, knocked unconscious, and awakes to find herself caught in a deadly trap from which she must escape or die.** When she finally struggles free, her captor appears, puts a rifle to her head, and asks “Will you continue?”
This has to be one of the most powerful and promising openings to a horror film I’ve seen since Tears of Kali (the first scene of which involves a woman cutting off her own eyelids with a pair of scissors). The problem is, it's too powerful and too promising. It makes the events that follow seem tame by comparison and lends the film an overall sense of anti-climax that never quite fades away. Indeed, the majority of Broken has more in common with a run-of-the-mill hostage thriller than a horror film, as the story traces the day-to-day interactions and subtly developing power-plays between the captive and her captor as she is kept chained up in an isolated woodland encampment and forced to perform menial chores such as washing pans and tending a small vegetable garden. When a third character is introduced—a schoolgirl who also survives the initial ‘test’ and is enslaved at the camp—the film almost begins to mimic a domestic abuse drama, with the older woman as a ‘mother’ desperately trying to placate a hysterical ‘daughter’ before her constant wailing induces the rage of an abusive ‘father’. Despite further scenes of violence (and a very effective shock ending) I couldn’t help but feel badly let down. The film’s opening gambit led me to believe that what I was about to witness would be a relentlessly brutal succession of senseless and sadistic trials to make Hostel look like The Care Bears Movie. What I actually witnessed was often no more unsettling than watching Reed and Donohoe bickering away at each other in Castaway. I have to admit that Broken does offer some impressive low-budget drama and suspense; but it's not the kind of horror I’d been hoping for.
* The idea of a character waking up imprisoned with no idea how or why seems to recur so frequently these days that it may be justifiable to regard it as a sub-genre in its own right. Recent examples include: Oldboy (2003), the Saw films (2004 onwards), Zulo (aka Hole) (2005), Haze (2005), and House of 9 (2005) … not forgetting the Cube series (1997 onwards), several early Twilight Zone episodes such as “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” (1961), and an episode of NBC’s Experiments in Television series, “The Cube”, which can be downloaded here.
** Once again, the Saw films spring to mind. However, Broken achieves a much more gruesome atmosphere than these films, with less reliance on fancy-schmancy editing. The scene in question here is certainly not recommended viewing for the squeamish. If the representative of the Leeds Film Festival who introduced its screening is to be believed, it caused at least one member of the audience at the previous week’s screening to pass out.
Broken @ IMDb
23 November 2006
The Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell
(Jonny Gillette & Kevin Wheatley, 2006)
A joyfully insane comic-book style comedy-horror / adventure-quest in which a host of bizarre characters (including, but by no means limited to, the descendants of JFK and Castro, a pair of not-too-bright androids, a deadly female cannibal, a genetic super race, and the spawn of Satan) battle for political control of post-nuclear-holocaust ‘New America’—all of which madness is presented in the form of a historical documentary from an even more distant future.
As an exercise in low-budget film-making, this is an incredible piece of work. It’s creative, original, funny, visually distinctive, packed full of ideas, and massively entertaining. The entire cast invest an admirable amount of energy in their performances, with co-director Wheatley playing the lead character of Tex Kennedy like a mutant conjunction of Jack Black and Bill Hicks. Something about the style of the film (specifically: the frequent interjections of the narrator; the quick cut-aways to illustrative diagrams, photos, etc.; and the highly amusing bickering among characters) reminded me of the US TV sitcom (which hasn’t had anything like the respect it deserves in the UK) Arrested Development (but then again, maybe this was just a subliminal effect of the presence of Tony Hale, who plays Buster in AD). It might also be possible (given the large cast of weird characters and the overall ‘adventure-quest’ feel) to describe Beach Party... as a kind of post-apocalyptic splatcore version of The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But enough of trying to explain the inexplicable. The bottom-line is: You should watch this film. It is good.
The Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell @ IMDb
A joyfully insane comic-book style comedy-horror / adventure-quest in which a host of bizarre characters (including, but by no means limited to, the descendants of JFK and Castro, a pair of not-too-bright androids, a deadly female cannibal, a genetic super race, and the spawn of Satan) battle for political control of post-nuclear-holocaust ‘New America’—all of which madness is presented in the form of a historical documentary from an even more distant future.
As an exercise in low-budget film-making, this is an incredible piece of work. It’s creative, original, funny, visually distinctive, packed full of ideas, and massively entertaining. The entire cast invest an admirable amount of energy in their performances, with co-director Wheatley playing the lead character of Tex Kennedy like a mutant conjunction of Jack Black and Bill Hicks. Something about the style of the film (specifically: the frequent interjections of the narrator; the quick cut-aways to illustrative diagrams, photos, etc.; and the highly amusing bickering among characters) reminded me of the US TV sitcom (which hasn’t had anything like the respect it deserves in the UK) Arrested Development (but then again, maybe this was just a subliminal effect of the presence of Tony Hale, who plays Buster in AD). It might also be possible (given the large cast of weird characters and the overall ‘adventure-quest’ feel) to describe Beach Party... as a kind of post-apocalyptic splatcore version of The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But enough of trying to explain the inexplicable. The bottom-line is: You should watch this film. It is good.
The Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell @ IMDb
20 November 2006
The Woods
(Lucky McKee, 2006)
Beware of anyone who tries to plug this film by saying that it stars Bruce Campbell in the male lead. What they are neglecting to tell you is that The Woods is set almost entirely within a girls’ school, and the only male roles other than Campbell’s are those of ‘Sheriff’ and ‘Doctor’. (Campbell’s character is on screen for slightly longer than either of these two, and therefore wins the title of ‘male lead’ on a technicality).
There are some positive things to be said about the film: The effects are quite slick; there’s a nice twist on the typical US high school queen-bitch character; and Campbell initiates a few brief moments of splatstick near the end. But the gore is too little too late; the exposition of the plot is garbled; and the whole thing is about as scary as Harry Potter.
The Woods @ IMDb
Beware of anyone who tries to plug this film by saying that it stars Bruce Campbell in the male lead. What they are neglecting to tell you is that The Woods is set almost entirely within a girls’ school, and the only male roles other than Campbell’s are those of ‘Sheriff’ and ‘Doctor’. (Campbell’s character is on screen for slightly longer than either of these two, and therefore wins the title of ‘male lead’ on a technicality).
There are some positive things to be said about the film: The effects are quite slick; there’s a nice twist on the typical US high school queen-bitch character; and Campbell initiates a few brief moments of splatstick near the end. But the gore is too little too late; the exposition of the plot is garbled; and the whole thing is about as scary as Harry Potter.
The Woods @ IMDb
Resonnances
(Philippe Robert, 2006)
Wouldn’t it be good if a film combined (1) a ghost story; (2) a ‘stranded in the wildnerness with a serial psychopath’ story; and (3) a sci-fi monster story along the lines of Tremors? If Resonnances is anything to go by, then the answer is clearly ‘no’. This film tries hard but achieves little. It obviously wants to be perceived as a whacky and enjoyable genre-mixing romp; but rather than being whacky, it seems desperate and unconvincing; and instead of being enjoyable, it’s boringly predictable. It has the overall feel of a rejected episode idea for The Outer Limits.
Resonnances @ Leeds International Film Festival website.
Wouldn’t it be good if a film combined (1) a ghost story; (2) a ‘stranded in the wildnerness with a serial psychopath’ story; and (3) a sci-fi monster story along the lines of Tremors? If Resonnances is anything to go by, then the answer is clearly ‘no’. This film tries hard but achieves little. It obviously wants to be perceived as a whacky and enjoyable genre-mixing romp; but rather than being whacky, it seems desperate and unconvincing; and instead of being enjoyable, it’s boringly predictable. It has the overall feel of a rejected episode idea for The Outer Limits.
Resonnances @ Leeds International Film Festival website.
Splinter
(Kai Maurer, 2005)
Ever wanted to know what happens when science fiction is written by someone who knows nothing about science and nothing about fiction? Well, here’s your chance. The speculative psychological theorising on which the plot of this film depends is at best naïve, and at worst utterly incoherent. The script is cringe-worthily awful, and the plot itself culminates in the single most atrociously offensive story-telling cliché known to humanity: the principal character wakes up at the end to find that it was all a dream (well, near enough: she actually wakes up to discover that she had fainted near the beginning of the film, and that the rest of the ‘story’ was a fiction created by her unconscious mind and captured on a thought-monitoring device). This is risible shit of the highest possible order.
Splinter @ IMDb
Ever wanted to know what happens when science fiction is written by someone who knows nothing about science and nothing about fiction? Well, here’s your chance. The speculative psychological theorising on which the plot of this film depends is at best naïve, and at worst utterly incoherent. The script is cringe-worthily awful, and the plot itself culminates in the single most atrociously offensive story-telling cliché known to humanity: the principal character wakes up at the end to find that it was all a dream (well, near enough: she actually wakes up to discover that she had fainted near the beginning of the film, and that the rest of the ‘story’ was a fiction created by her unconscious mind and captured on a thought-monitoring device). This is risible shit of the highest possible order.
Splinter @ IMDb
02 November 2006
Kairo
(Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001)
Ostensibly, this is a horror film about an overpopulated ghost realm spilling its occupants over into the real world. But the actual horrors with which Kurosawa is concerned appear to be far less supernatural: loneliness, isolation, social breakdown, and their relationships with technology. This makes Kairo one of the most highly metaphorical horror films you’re likely to see. For this reason, I have to say that I respected it. Whether I actually liked it is another question. The metaphysics underlying the story (i.e., how exactly the ghost realm and the real world are supposed to be interconnected) are virtually impenetrable; so it feels like fighting an uphill battle trying to figure what the hell is going on from one scene to the next. A large part of this is, undoubtedly, due to the film’s being steeped in cultural meanings and references that are bound to pass well below the radar of a Western viewer like myself. (According to this entry in Wikipedia, for example, Kairo is critiquing Japanese cultural trends such as Hikikomori and suicide pacts; a fact—if it is one—that I had no idea about when watching the film.)
On the whole, then, I feel obliged to blame myself rather than Kurosawa for the fact that I found his film difficult to like. I also find myself forced to re-evaluate my opinion of his more recent Rofuto (aka Loft), which I originally dismissed as total shit. I’m now more confident that Rofuto, like Kairo, is working on some highly figurative level as a statement about fears and obsessions the interpretation of which is heavily culture-dependent, and not at all easy for a Western audience to appreciate.*
Kairo @ IMDb (UK)
*Like several other recent J-Horrors, Kairo has been subject to a US remake. I haven’t seen it, so can only assume that the Japan-specific metaphors have been lost, and the plot has been rendered comprehensible for the average multiplex-going American. Would that mean I’d enjoy it more? Sadly, I fear the answer could be ‘yes’; but the real question is: would I respect myself in the morning?
Ostensibly, this is a horror film about an overpopulated ghost realm spilling its occupants over into the real world. But the actual horrors with which Kurosawa is concerned appear to be far less supernatural: loneliness, isolation, social breakdown, and their relationships with technology. This makes Kairo one of the most highly metaphorical horror films you’re likely to see. For this reason, I have to say that I respected it. Whether I actually liked it is another question. The metaphysics underlying the story (i.e., how exactly the ghost realm and the real world are supposed to be interconnected) are virtually impenetrable; so it feels like fighting an uphill battle trying to figure what the hell is going on from one scene to the next. A large part of this is, undoubtedly, due to the film’s being steeped in cultural meanings and references that are bound to pass well below the radar of a Western viewer like myself. (According to this entry in Wikipedia, for example, Kairo is critiquing Japanese cultural trends such as Hikikomori and suicide pacts; a fact—if it is one—that I had no idea about when watching the film.)
On the whole, then, I feel obliged to blame myself rather than Kurosawa for the fact that I found his film difficult to like. I also find myself forced to re-evaluate my opinion of his more recent Rofuto (aka Loft), which I originally dismissed as total shit. I’m now more confident that Rofuto, like Kairo, is working on some highly figurative level as a statement about fears and obsessions the interpretation of which is heavily culture-dependent, and not at all easy for a Western audience to appreciate.*
Kairo @ IMDb (UK)
*Like several other recent J-Horrors, Kairo has been subject to a US remake. I haven’t seen it, so can only assume that the Japan-specific metaphors have been lost, and the plot has been rendered comprehensible for the average multiplex-going American. Would that mean I’d enjoy it more? Sadly, I fear the answer could be ‘yes’; but the real question is: would I respect myself in the morning?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)