HEY, KNOW WHAT'S A REAL MOVIE?

REVIEW: ABOLITION

The idea of the anti-Christ has been a huge part of the genre, at the very least, since the Christian timeline. Obviously I don’t just mean mass media, but in culture itself. This idea that the son of the devil is out there, or will be out there, and will bring about the end of times, has always been a powerful presence in the Catholic faith. It has extended itself to classics like Rosemary’s Baby, and more directly, The Omen. It would seem that Abolition is the next step.

Playing out more like a sequel to The Omen, Abolition (meaning “the end”) is about a lowly anti-Christ named Joshua (Andrew Roth). He is not outwardly evil, nor is he purposely amassing followers to bring about the apocalypse. No, it turns out the anti-Christ is a lowly and dour maintenance man, born of what I suppose should be called demaculate conception. After the building in which he works and lives is condemned, he finds himself living on the street amongst those others who were displaced. He begins to amass followers without even trying, and flipside shades to biblical stories are presented; there isn’t just the aforementioned scene of virgin conception, but the story of Jesus breaking five loaves of bread to feed thousands of people is also re-interpreted as Joshua begins to hand out sliced bread to the indigents surrounding him. There’s nothing miraculous to be seen here—instead, the indigents begin to claw at each other like animals, desperate to satisfy the hunger in their stomachs. The scene soon grows so violent that Joshua ends up fleeing.

After a near-deadly altercation with a street hood, Joshua collapses on the steps of a church, where he is found and cared for by Matthew (Reggie Bannister, in an atypical role). As the two become more acquainted, Joshua explains that he used to be the maintenance man at another building, so Matthew invites him to oversee maintenance in the apartment building that he owns. One of this building’s inhabitants, Mia (Elisa Dowling), is presented as a conflicted but potential love interest for Joshua after he saves her from a rape attempt. Filling out the cast is Caroline Williams as Joshua’s mother, aka the woman in the opening of the film who goes to bed, has a bunch of nightmares, and wakes up preggers. Seeing as how she’s the mother of the anti-Christ, she’s got a few…problems.

Much like anything having to do with religion, shit eventually hits the fan.

There is a good idea somewhere in Abolition. I like the idea of the anti-Christ not really being that bad of a dude. I like that he’s conflicted and depressed, not because he knows what he is, but because that’s just his personality. I like that he’s not painted to be a generic villain, but that instead great attempts were made to actually make viewers feel…sympathy for the devil? (So, so sorry.) The problem is the film just doesn’t do enough with this concept, and so much of the running time is spent meandering along that when things start to get interesting, we’re only ten minutes away from closing credits.

Andrew Roth as Joshua gives a performance that, after a while, becomes exhausting. Viewers can only spend so much time with a broken-down character before it starts to take its toll. At least that’s the case for me. Roth is competent enough and carries all the scenes he’s in, but after a while, it somehow manages to feel like way too much as well as not enough.

As previously mentioned, Reggie Bannister gives a good performance as Matthew, which is propelled by the decidedly more serious tone of the film. While Reggie will always be best known for the Phantasm series as the guitar-plucking, 4-barrel-shotgun-wielding, skirt-chasing ice-cream man, his career has mainly extended primarily to bit parts in direct-to-video garbage. While nice to see him in something more grounded, it’s a shame the film itself wasn’t better.

Abolition unfolds at a pace that will seem downright punishing to even the most patient of viewers. I can’t say the film was ever boring, but you spend so much time waiting for the big pay off that when it comes, you’re nearly furious that you’re not given more to go with.

I will always give credit to filmmakers who wish to tell a story with less flash and gimmick. It’s evident here that co-writer/director Mike Klassen believes in his story, enough that he’s confident his particular pacing is worth the journey. I’m not sure I’d agree with the method.

Like that age-old belief, "How do you know that homeless man asking you for food isn’t Christ himself?,"  Abolition asks, "How do you know that lowly maintenance man you disregard on a daily basis isn’t going to bring about the end of everything?"

Unfortunately, in this case, you'll find it hard to care.

COMPANY

"Do you ever find yourself talking with the dead? Since [my son] Willie's death, I catch myself every day, involuntarily talking with him, as if he were with me."

CREEP

Three years ago I went to a national chess tourney with some friends. We stopped off at a restaurant, and there was this older man there who claimed he was traveling cross-country, meeting famous people and the like. So the friends I'm traveling with - their Dad tells me to go interview him for the trip. I had brought along a video camera, you see, to document the trip and the tourney. So I went over to him and sat down and offered him an interview about his travels. He seemed jovial at first, but when I brought up cameras he became alarmed as hell, and very unsettled. I had to promise him not to record him in any way. I was a bit put off, but I agreed. So I decided to try my best to remember the conversation after we had it and I would jot it down later.

So for the first half of the conversation everything went pretty all right. He told me stories of his travels on the road, close calls in towns, people trying to mug him, close calls hitchhiking with people who turn out not so normal (ironic really), and places he'd been. He also liked talking up religion a lot. So then he starts talking about one time he camped outside of a town in Minnesota. He tells me how he stops at this diner, and this girl there starts hitting on him. The story got really weird, and long story short, it turned into him trying to run away from this girl after she found him at his campsite and tried to rape him. But I chocked it up as a tale he told to spice up the conversation because he enjoyed my company, and I let it go. 

But then he hit me with a zinger. He told me that he predicted what the girl was going to do. He told me he could predict things because he had power. He started talking about the Bible, God, and the second coming a lot. Then he got in my face and said he thought he could trust me. So he asked me if I wanted to know who he really was. I started getting really unsure about this whole thing, but I said sure. 

He took his hands and placed them on the table, laying them flat. On his palms were holes going straight through, from one side to the other. His feet had them too. He said he was marked as the Second Coming, and he was traveling the country bringing the truth and healing and helping others, and operating a website out of his van. He said he had not yet risen to power, but he would, and when he had met his quota, he would bring Heaven back to Earth. 

All I could think was "Holy shit, holy shit, this guy stabbed nails through his hands and feet. Please don't kill me, Mister. I've got so much to give." A friend of mine came over to tell me we were leaving at that point, and he also saw the "stigmata" on the guys hands. He just stared at it, like "Holy shit, does this guy think he's really Jesus Christ"? The guy told me his website. I looked it up later. It doesn't exist. I swear there was a van outside with a satellite dish though. I almost said there wasn't but then I remembered there was. He told us to be careful on our trip as bad storms would be coming and they would rain on the good and the wicked alike. Sure enough, on our way back days later, we ran through some pretty heavy, tornadic thunderstorms.

I'll never forget that shit as long as I live. I sat right across from a man who stabbed himself in the hands and feet with nails.

Story source.

Image source.

REVIEW: THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE (DIE FARBE)

I wish I were more familiar with H.P. Lovecraft. I’ve read only a sampling of his work – “Rats in the Walls” and “Re-Animator” – and, like Poe, found his prose to be simultaneously beautiful and antiquatedly tedious. I recognize both Lovecraft and Poe’s skills as literary legends, but perhaps it’s my simple-minded brain that keeps me from fully embracing their bodies of work. Regardless, they have my undying respect for contributing to the genre and elevating it with their presence.

Because of this, I had no real idea what to expect as I sat down to watch The Colour Out of Space. My exposure to Lovecraft at that point had been the aforementioned short stories, as well as other more modern fare that directly homages and honors the author, like Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, or Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond. Lovecraft writes of slimy, distorted, indescribable monstrosities from other worlds – both in a sci-fi as well as a more general horrific sense. Reading a quick summary of the original short story confirms that the film adaptation is mostly loyal, but obviously has to punch it up a bit to expand the story to an appropriate feature length.

Jonathan Davis (Ingo Heise), of Arkham, Massachusetts (a popular Lovecraft setting), is investigating the disappearance of his father (Ralf Lichtenberg). This investigation leads him all the way to Germany, where he meets Armin Pierske (Michael Kausch), who recognizes a picture of Jonathan’s father…not the recent one he has been using to canvass, but another that depicts him as a young soldier. The two sit down as Armin begins to relate the tale of “the colour,” what it did to the countryside after it crash-landed out of space in a meteorite, and how his father comes into play. It would seem that this meteorite contained a radioactive element that caused nearby produce to double or even triple its size – and that's not all; insects, too, rapidly expanded, and bees grew to the size of rats. Lastly, its exposure to human beings left them in catatonic, near-mad states, and once that occurred, there was no redemption for them.

While I can’t speak for the source material (my assumption comes from Lovecraft stories with which I am already familiar), I am sure The Colour Out of Space unfolds in the same sense as the short story; meaning, it probably takes its time. The adaptation sure does – but not in a detracting sense. Like the types of literature and films its honoring, it unfolds one piece at a time, like any good mystery should do. And despite the horror and sci-fi presence, at its core the film is a mystery. Shot in black and white, it recalls the dreary and mystical world of film noir, made most popular during the early 20th century. This choice of black and white was not obvious to me right away – I at first assumed that the filmmakers chose a black and white canvas due to the completely unique aspect of “the colour” said to be wreaking havoc across the land. For a color that had no place within the earthly color spectrum, I assumed this was the filmmakers’ way of skirting such an impossible task as creating an entirely "new" color. I should have given them more credit. “The colour” does make an appearance, and it appropriately remains the only object in the film to be colorized – artificially, obviously, which definitely lends it a very unnatural appearance. No, the filmmakers chose a black-and-white palette to lend it a foreign and almost dream-like look. And it certainly works, at times coming dangerously close to recalling The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Admittedly, The Colour Out of Space did not grab me at first. I was interested in the story, but not invested. And unfortunately the scenes in which our characters spoke English (German is mostly utilized) sounded very tinny and echoey, as if the characters’ dialogue had been recorded in a phone booth. (The film is a German production, so perhaps the scenes featuring English dialogue were reshoots in order to make international sales more appealing?) I can’t imagine this was a purposeful choice, for if it was, there is no clear reason for it. However, I eventually began to lose myself in the story. As previously mentioned, each layer was peeled back to reveal a new development – the giant fruit, the monstrous bees, and catatonia of the nearby residents – and I found myself very intrigued.

If I had one word to describe The Colour Out of Space, it would be ambitious. Our filmmakers clearly did not have a very large budget, but their sprawling, international story feels bigger than life. What scant CGI effects there are look damn good and comparable to what you’d see in modern theaters, and because they are particularly placed throughout the script, the scope feels bigger in recollection. The direction by Huan Vu (a German Asian! I know! Crazy!) is well-assured, and at times even beautiful. The acting for the most part is more than satisfactory. A few minor characters have a couple lines that don’t sound at all convincing, but luckily our leads feel completely genuine. (You will stare at the young version of Armin Piersk and swear it’s Frederik Zoller, star of the fake Nation’s Pride in Inglorious Basterds, but you’d be wrong.)

Fans of Lovecraft would be missing out if they did not give this adaptation a try. Additionally, fans of film noir, German expressionism, sci-fi, and classic tales of horror should also check it out.

BUY ME THIS: PET SEMATARY PROP

This is Judd's (Fred Gwynne) mechanical head from the 1989 Stephen King classic horror film Pet Sematary. The bust can be seen as undead child Gage (Miko Hughes) slices Jud across the mouth with a scalpel in the process of killing him. The bust is made out of urethane over a foam core and has been painted and detailed to appear as if it were the real actor complete with white sideburns and hair around the lower back of the head. The open mouth is covered in dried fake blood and has a cut across it. The most exciting part of this piece is the top piece of the hollowed-out head is exposed with two black levers inside that when manipulated, move the mouth up and down. There are also thin plastic tubes still connected that were used to pump blood through the mouth, completing the gruesome effect. This head is mounted on a small wooden base, is labeled “Fred Gwynne” at the bottom, and measures approximately 19" x 15" x 11" (48cm x 38cm x 28cm). This piece is in good condition.

Wow.

Buy it for me!

REVIEW: THE HUNT

Historical and classic literature remains with us to this very day, not just in their original textual form, but in other ways—re-realized, re-envisioned, and redistributed.  One need look no further than “Sons of Anarchy” to see a very modern, bloody, and bad-ass retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. AMC’s massively popular “Breaking Bad” carries shades of both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as well as the soul-to-the-devil legend of Faust. Even Twilight, the most absurdly terrible thing to happen to both literature and cinema, unfortunately must be associated with the bloodsucker that started it all, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (sans glitter and organized vampire baseball games).

The reason I bring this up is because there’s another dark tale from our literary past that often resurfaces in film—that of the 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell, a morbid tale of men hunting down their favorite kind of pray in a forest or jungle landscape: other human beings. This tale has inspired some massive contributions to our genre, including Predator, Battle Royale, the absurd Van Damme actioneer Hard Target, and The Hunger Games (along with scores of others, whose titles get more and more cheesy the further we go back).

Thomas Szczepanski's survival film The Hunt is the latest re-appropriation of Connell’s story, and it surely won’t be the last. While it doesn’t bring anything new to the table, it provides enough thrills and shocks to warrant a viewing.

*

A young tabloid reporter named Alex is on his last leg at his paper. Readers no longer care about the dog-fucking women he interviews and shoots for his articles, and the editor demands he bring her something of substance, or he’ll be without a job in one week’s time. Desperate for any kind of lead, he visits his girlfriend, a local stripper/fetish sex-worker to see if she can point him towards any of her regular clients that could make for a salacious story. One thing leads to another and he finds himself drawn into the world of human hunting, run by a team of anonymous and extremely wealthy men. The game is simple: three victims, their tongues cut out to prevent being able to blow the lid off the whole thing, have small cases locked to their wrists and are sent out into the woods, where they are to be hunted down and killed. If they are, the successful hunter wins whatever awaits them within the locked cases; essentially, the “bets” that the hunters made before the start of the game. Alex, masking his true identity, takes part in the game to see just how far these men are willing to go in the name of the ultimate sport.

The Hunt landed unceremoniously on video earlier this summer, which is somewhat of a shame, given that the film is more than competently directed by Frenchman Thomas Szczepanski. With the film being 75 minutes, he has a lot of story to tell within that amount of time. And while the crux of that story is told in a way that’s at least aesthetically thrilling, what could have been an exemplary take on the story, had it been more fleshed out, instead becomes merely satisfying. The Hunt never fails to entertain on a superficial level, being that you’re watching a team of men hunt another, not going easy on their pray once they catch up. In that gleefully sadistic way of which only the French are capable (see Haute Tension, Inside, Martyrs), The Hunt, too, spares no expense when it comes to bloodshed. Though it is not consistently violent, when violence does occur, it has no problem with going over the top.

*

There are very interesting themes at play here, especially being that the men in charge of the game are presented as extremely wealthy (which isn’t a new addition to the story, but could have been much more exploited thanks to the present-day chasm between the middle and upper class.) Not to mention that as the camera pans across the walls the first time we see the mansion which houses what could be called home base of the game, snippets of antiquated paintings and portraits of stately men very subtly suggest that the hunt is anything but new—that, perhaps, it’s been going on for centuries.

Szczepanski is more interested in spinning a stylistic tale than poking at your moral fibers, though there is one specific sequence in the film that’s absolutely due for praise: in a moment where Alex finds himself in the midst of the game, splashing river water across his face in an effort to shock him back to reality, he spies one of the intended victims staring at him from the other side of the river. Alex stares at this victim for a long time, a peculiar look on his face, as the victim, unsure of what’s about to happen, looks back in fear. It’s a great moment because we, as the audience, have absolutely no idea how Alex is going to respond. We already know that Alex is already kind of losing his mind in the thick of the game’s madness. And we also know the sole reason he’s even involved in the game is to save his career, the goal behind that, of course, being money. Well, before him sits a wad of cash in the case chained to the victims’ arm. Will Alex blow the lid off the story, as is the reason he is there in the first place? Or will he push all that aside and join the game, in hopes of hitting it big?. Presenting this question in the form of this scene was an extremely purposeful choice, and it’s expertly handled by the filmmaker.

Unfortunately, the film suffers form that age-old adage: We simply aren’t provided enough background on Alex for us to care about him as a character. All we really know about him is he’s a muckraking reporter who is dating a sex worker, and whose only motivation in life seems to be keeping his job at the tabloid. Except for some sex, Alex and his girlfriend don’t share any scenes together that make us feel like they are anything beyond roommates. Really, there’s no emotional moments shared between either of them at all, so all we’re left to root for is an empty shell of a man who could escape the game as just as easily succumb to it—and we, the viewers, wouldn’t really care either way.

A brisk running time, some thrilling action scenes, and all kinds of bodily harm will ensure that viewers will certainly have a good experience, but those hoping for some more socially relevant themes might find themselves disappointed.

* Images from the film are impossible to find, so my thanks to Basement Screams for the use (stole 'em) of its screen grabs.