GORE IN THE STORE - NEW DVD RELEASES FOR 16th MARCH 2007

 

This week saw the culmination of a rather glorious slice of interactive marketing on behalf of the Weinstein Company in the US. In celebration of their upcoming opus maximus ‘Grindhouse’, they, along with the ever-burgeoning indie film festival SxSW, launched a superb -- and extensively subscribed -- exploitation trailer contest. Amateur filmmakers were invited to submit their wild and unique interpretations of every glorious grindhouse trope that ever saw the inside of a stinking pit of a 42nd Street theater. From stop motion cannibals to excruciatingly dubbed giallo; from satanic, guitar-wielding banshees to death cult bikers. The contest provided a cornucopia of sleaze and sensationalism and was quite simply one of the very best uses of youtube.com yet devised (not counting the resurgence of the genuine article, via many a net-hungry insomniac’s VHS collection and the impressive horde of vintage coming attractions they unleash).

 

Robert Rodriguez took it upon himself to judge the three finalists and decreed the astonishing and thoroughly fetid “Hobo With A Shotgun” as champion. While the grungy vigilante skit was a deserved overall winner, I have to admit doesn’t possess quite the terrific filmmaking innovation the trailer for ‘Cong Of The Dead’ has in abundance. Go to youtube and hook yourself up. It’s practically guaranteed you’ll have an orgiastic riot with each delirious minute.

 

If these eclectic, reverential endeavors are any indication, the spirit of those long-gone times is very much alive and well. Rodriguez and Tarantino have an audience to deliver to in spades -- it’ll be a wondrous thing to see them finally pull it off in a couple months time.

 

To tide us over this week:

 

Cure: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, somewhat maligned by the undignified US remake of his superior ‘Pulse’ (‘Kairo’) in last week’s DVD stash, here lays more groundwork in his vying for the title ‘Most Underrated Asian Director Working Today’. Lacking the shocks of Miike, the kineticism of Woo, Hark and Lam or the mainstream artsiness of Wong Kar Wai or even Hideo Nakata, Kurosawa is a long way from emulating the worldwide recognition of his namesake. Which is a crying shame since he makes some of the most provocative and profoundly rewarding horror pictures of the last decade.

 

More akin to the chilly tone of Canuck filmmakers Atom Egoyan and Cronenberg than to the expected 21st century touchstone of David Fincher and his sepia brood, Korosawa’s grim tales are austere, intelligent and more than speckled with ambiguity.

 

“Cure” is a typically spartan pitch -- ordinary citizens begin unleashing extraordinarily gruesome acts of violence in an apparently random series of events across modern day Tokyo. One man seems to be at the root of it, yet how he is causing this to happen is unfathomable to the city’s police. Is it coercion, mass hypnosis or something….more?

 

Stark and scarifying, like his later “Séance”, Kurosawa eschews easy interpretation. What could be a simple, spare thriller could just as easily be an existential mind fuck of the highest order, where neither rhyme nor reason as we know it really exist. Kurosawa’s picture makes you work hard as a viewer to unravel the oft-labyrinthine course of events permeating this, and indeed all, his elegantly etched just-real worlds. In these times of bluntly telegraphed thrills, this is surely worth celebrating.

 

 

Pan’s Labyrinth: to label Guillermo del Toro’s sublime gothic fantasy ‘brutal’ and ‘bloody’, as some mainstream press have done, is surely prevaricating for a more hardcore horror audience at the expense of the plentiful nuance and honest-to-goodness drama of this lush fable. Yes, on one levels it’s a genuinely full-tilt genre boogie from the director of ‘Blade II’ and ‘Hellboy’ that unsheathes a series of sucker-punch moments unlike anything seen in fantasy film for a good long while. But it’s also a simply told yet staggeringly layered tale.

 

Following young Ofelia’s journey into the dark heart of the Spanish civil war under the auspices of one hell of a wicked stepfather, it’s not just the distressingly capricious landscape into which she retreats to find her true self which affects audiences so deeply. There are more than a few utterly astonishing moments of the ‘beautiful, grotesque’ in both worlds, all as metaphorically apposite as anything else in the picture. But like the best filmmakers in the business, del Toro accomplishes his most effective non-fantasy sequences with little more than judicious cuts and sound. And how accomplished it is. This is simply the zenith of modern filmmaking by an artist at the very peak of his abilities.

“Pan's Labyrinth” is a small, contained and intimate ‘epic’, a brilliant companion piece to 'The Devil's Backbone' (and more importantly to 'Cronos') in its melding of horrors of the mind vs. horrors of real life and the place of myth and legend. With its awards-worthy cast, it's the exquisitely emotive fairy tale Shyamalan wishes he could make. One of the films of the decade

 

 

Guillermo del Toro Box Set: as if by magic, Optimum have launched del Toro’s masterpiece to market accompanied by a box set of his most deeply felt, and not coincidentally Spanish language works. Needless to say it’s an essential purchase. As if any reader of the site needs any further cajoling, “Cronos”, del Toro’s debut and one of the most stark, original and penetrating vampire pictures of the last 50 years, “The Devil’s Backbone” his heart-wrenching excursion into the fears of youth (both internal, external, national and deeply personal) and ‘Pan’s…’ represent the apex of modern genre filmmaking. We should be eternally grateful for as intuitive a talent as del Toro. It’s both his and our good fortune that producers continue to have faith his unique, at times difficult, but always visionary brand of cinematic unsettlement. This box is as good a place to start as any.

 

 

 

 

Intruder: one passage of my misspent youth -- wiling away a series of endless summers convincing video store staff I was indeed 18 years of age -- began when I was in fact 14. Having to invent both a fictitious day job and the travails that went with it simply so I could bullshit with the increasingly gracious till clerks with requisite plausibility was the tricky part. But it seemed all worth it once I encountered the blood-drenched gems I was exposed to in those formative years due to that scurrilous exploitation of goodwill. Mr Marcasi, I am truly sorry. But thank you.

 

One such morsel was this then-lesser-known gimmicky slasher picture about a night crew of supermarket shift workers being terrorized by a maniacal madman. It was also the directorial debut of Scott Spiegel, until that point known only for co-writing “Evil Dead II”. Nothing to be sniffed at, sure. But it was few years later that his friendship with Quentin Tarantino and the splat pack gave Spiegel ample environment with which to flex his creative muscles and enjoy a hell of a genre revitalization. The low-fi, almost Coen Brothers-esque blood bath that emerged was a self-reflexive gag reel that appealed to just a few die-hard horror geeks. Or so it seemed.

 

This was a long time before Kevin Williamson was (wrongly) heralded as bringing a tirade of smirking awareness to a supposedly tired genre. “Intruder”’s seemingly typical parade of gore gags permeating a generic stalk ‘n’ slash narrative was perceived as just that by an indifferent audience. What they seemed to overlook was the sharp, slacker tone of the whole enterprise, the gleeful revelry in the visual language of the horror film and cinema itself. It’s no masterpiece, but it was made by people who demonstrably dug the same pictures in much the same way you did; that much was a blessed certainty. Before Tarantino made it cool to be self-aware (and a long time after people had forgotten a host of directors from decades past who were just as knowing and ironic), Spiegel and his band of collaborators, including producer Lawrence Bender, the KNB f/x crew and fellow director Sam Raimi slumming with his brother Ted in a featured supporting role, were having a merry old time. They were creating just the breed of inventive gore picture that the up-and-coming horror heroes of today -- Adam Green and Scott Glosserman to name just two -- have been springing upon appreciative audiences in the last 12 months.

 

Available uncut for the first time here -- in truth it was never that much of a graphic gala of torture and mayhem though it did include a commendable cavalcade of cleaved flesh at the mercy of the wide variety of butcher’s implements one might expect to find in a supermarket -- it’s well worth hunting down. For slasher completists, it’s a must have. For the merely curious, it’s still the kind of terrific time you thought you might never have again with a relic of the 1980s.

 

The Prestige: like a true cinematic confidence trick, Christopher Nolan’s infuriating period thriller dazzles for as long as you are able to refrain from reflecting too closely upon the dexterous mechanics behind the story being told. Or at least what you think is the story being told. It’s that kind of picture and one Nolan himself has proven adept at once already with “Memento”. Unlike that ultimately rather straightforward (in all but the telling) tale, this is less about what’s being done by the characters, than how they dun it. And why.

 

Without giving too much away, the story -- which takes in murder, betrayal, illusion, faith, hard science and possibly much more -- is essentially one tremendous grudge match played out by two expert showman whose stakes are literally life and death. Australian Hugh Jackman -- U.S. accent:good -- and Brit Christian Bale -- cockney accent: appalling -- thrust and parry over whose act is the future of stage illusion and also who was truly to blame for the death of Jackman’s wife in a tragic theatrical accident when they were both young bucks starting out in the business.

 

Spanning a good decade or more, the expected facets of the period epic are neatly interwoven with sparkling character business from mentor Michael Caine and rogue scientist David Bowie and the picture is dense both thematically and narratively. That does come at the expense of a certain depth, though. Because so much of the tale’s impact is about sleight of hand, it’s not until perhaps two thirds of the way through the picture that the real crux of the tale emerges. By then, a few too many clues have been awkwardly paraded in front of the audience and this is something that takes the wind from the sails of at least one vital element of the final reveal.

 

This involvement in the aesthetics of magic may be necessary for a picture so involved in the psychological study of those who make their art and life from deception -- in more ways than one as it turns out -- but as a story, it falters at too many turns. Relying too much on an audience willing to invest in the illogical for the sake of a plot point encountered another half hour down the line, it’s simply too tricksy by half. For those who appreciate the otherwise fascinatingly constructed journey, that’s reward in itself. For those invested in Nolan the proven storyteller, however, it’s a frustrating ride toward a fairly pedestrian and, shockingly, rather easily discernable denouement.

© London FrightFest Ltd. 2000-2007