Adolescence on the Lane through Hell - L.I.E. (LONG ISLAND EXPRESSWAY) (2001)

You know who should have won all the awards by now?  Paul Dano, who has done nothing but fantastic work ever since his breakout role in Little Miss Sunshine but NOOOO...we can't POSSIBLY give him an Oscar or six, he's an offbeat character actor!  Even though it appears he's getting praise for 12 Years a Slave, those nominations are all for ensemble casts, so they don't really count.  Dano has one of the most original presences in film today and is totally unafraid to take risks - his performance as the mentally stunted Alex Jones in Prisoners* is one of the most haunting elements of an already stunning psychological horror film, and the fact that he's not up for anything for it makes me want to smash the Academy's face in a pile of barbecued dog hair.  That being said, one of his most affecting performances is actually one of his first, one he did when he was only 17 and got him a bunch of (now forgotten) praise - L.I.E. (Long Island Expressway).  Gaining some paltry controversy upon its wide release for the MPAA slapping it with an NC-17 rating (forcing the filmmakers to make an R-rated re-edit), L.I.E. remains one of the best explorations of the pains of coming of age I've ever seen on film.

15-year-old Howie Blitzer (Dano) isn't getting through his sophomore year of High School without a fight.  Still reeling from the recent death of his mother on the Long Island Expressway (which Howie informs us also killed Harry Chapin and Alan J. Pakula), Howie isn't getting much attention from his father (Bruce Altman, the psychiatrist in Matchstick Men), a walking blood pressure bomb who is recently coming under F.B.I. investigation because of shady contracting work that resulted in a tragic house fire.  He has companionship in Gary (Billy Kay, the baby in Three Men and a Baby; I'm not kidding), unnervingly pretty and a peg up from Dickensian street urchin, and to a lesser extent the quite ordinary Brian (Tony Donnelly) and the more-quite idiotic Kevin (James Costa), who is unconvinced that sleeping with his sister will get her pregnant.  The four of them spend their time cutting class and burglarizing local houses under Gary's leadership, though Gary's attentions are mostly fixated upon Howie.  The two of them share a palpable sexual tension, but Howie is unsure of how he feels about Gary and himself - Gary pitches the idea of the two of them running away to California, and Howie agrees, though it's not clear if he really believes Gary's offer.  Gary gets Howie to break into the home of middle-aged ex-marine Big John Harrigan (Brian Cox, Manhunter's Hannibal Lecter) during his birthday party on the pretense of robbing the place, but Gary starts trashing his basement and cursing his name.  John runs down to catch them but they get away, but not with John ripping off the back pocket of Howie's jeans.  

As it turns out, Big John is an ephebophile, and Gary has been hustling on the side with John as one of his regulars.  John confronts him about a pair of valuable Vietcong handguns that are missing (as well as a hook-up) before driving around Howie's neighborhood with his pants pocket like "Cinderella's glass slipper", as he calls it later.  He later finds Howie at a pizza place and introduces himself in French - he claims he knew Howie's mother, and she told him all about Howie and his French skills, though John probably got the information from Gary.  He invites Howie to come to his house to return the guns, and Howie swings by, currently at odds with a school counselor trying to keep him from getting expelled and his father, who caught him cutting class and angrily punched him in the eye (his lawyer had a fatal heart attack at lunch).  When he arrives at John's house, getting a faceful of John's Marine Hymn doorbell as well as meeting John's 19-year-old lover Scott (Walter Masterson), he gives John the gun case only to find one missing; he says that's all he could find, as he had to retrieve it from Gary's room when he wasn't there.  He asks if he can work off the $1000 the missing gun is worth, and John bemusedly takes Howie into the living room (which has a porn playing on a TV) to talk.  While John appears to be friendly, and the two bond a bit over Howie's surprising cultural knowledge (he recognizes a Chagall print on the wall), he asks if Howie knows anything about him, then starts rubbing his leg, asking if he has anything worth $1000.  "Five inches is a lot of snow, it's a tremendous amount of rain but it ain't a whole lot of dick.  You got more than five inches, Howard?"  

We see that Gary was at Howie's house; he had seen Howie's Dad going through an envelope stuffed with cash earlier and dropped by to steal it and skip town.  Howie's dad later tears his room apart looking for the cash, only to be greeted at the door by the F.B.I., who take him into custody.  With both his dad and his best friend gone and having been picked up by the police on suspicion of local burglaries, Howie is taken in by John, their relationship becoming more subtle and complex, leading Howie to striking realizations of his own identity and the emotional journey into the wilds of adulthood.


OK, oh-kay, room elephants first - L.I.E. deals with a number of sensitive topics, such as broken families, incest, ephebophilia, child prostitution and juvenile delinquency.  However, first-time writer-director Michael Cuesta is in no mood for obvious moralizing.  The movie isn't about any one of those topics, but rather about its deeply-drawn characters and how these issues are decor in their lives.  Howie, his dad, Gary and John are all highly complex, flawed people, and their desires and frustrations, and especially the way their lives intertwine, can't be pigeonholed into a PTA agenda.  Cuesta is likewise uninterested in giving easy answers to uncomfortable questions, and the way they are explored is extraordinarily intelligent and thought-provoking.  We don't see the story as a series of moralistic mile markers - it's just an expertly-told story with serious and troubling undercurrents.  For example, sexuality is a major theme in the film, but there is no sex and hardly even nudity, save for the male leads each appearing shirtless at different times in the movie.  The genius of L.I.E. is that the characters are all unique and compelling, each dealing with very specific issues, but we can see echoes of larger issues that are present in our own lives, even if we have never robbed houses or lost our parents to death or imprisonment.  While you may not have met anybody quite like Howie in your life, his emotional journey is very true to both adolescence and sexual discovery.  Sex is largely forbidden before college, so it's easy for teenagers to have no idea about their orientation for many years.  I went through all of Middle and High schools before I figured out that I was attracted to men, and that was only because a crush sent a shock through my system and the realization dropped on me like a ton of bricks.  As somebody who should be able to tell, I can say with no hesitation that Howie's arc of realization is one of the most sensitive and intelligent depictions of the discovery of sexual identity I've ever seen in fiction.**


While the script is fantastic enough, what really makes the movie is its performances.  Dano is known these days for his more unhinged performances and strange roles, but Howie is his most naturalistic, sympathetic performance I've seen.  Great child actors are few and far between, and Dano displays a skill and self-control well beyond his years.  Brian Cox is an intimidating presence as Big John, completely fearless and having great fun with the dramatic possibilities of a largely despicable character.  Considering that he played Hannibal Lecter with great skill and engrossment in Michael Mann's Manhunter, it comes as no surprise that he's willing to plunge into his role here.  Billy Kay may have initially been cast for his striking beauty, but he's a formidably precocious counterpoint to Howie's hesitations, completely aware of himself and equally amoral.  Bruce Altman is both frustrating and sympathetic as Howie's dad, torn by the growing distance between him and his son and increasingly afraid of his legal situation.  The other actors are immediately vivid, a must considering how intricate the story is for a 95-minute movie.


As per the NC-17 rating, I've only seen the R-rated cut and have no idea what was trimmed to get it down to that version, but I suspect it was something largely inconsequential.  The MPAA is stacked in favor of studio movies, and an independent film about juvenile delinquency and underage prostitution is exactly the kind of movie they like slapping the Seal of Death on.  For what it's worth, the movie is quite flowing and shows no signs of being chopped up, so it's possible the cut scenes weren't even that necessary.  The R version even includes a scene where Howie masturbates while trying to go to sleep, a scene you'd think the MPAA would force out of the movie but was left seemingly untouched.  If I were you I wouldn't worry about the rating in the least bit, as the movie is anything but exploitative.  L.I.E. is a brilliant and engrossing coming of age story whose characters and themes grow more fascinating with each viewing.  The questions it raises are worth debating, and the story is so rich that there's a new detail or talking point waiting around every corner.  Its two DVD editions, one R-rated and the other Unrated, went out of print with the collapse of their distributor, New Yorker Video, but you can find it on demand or your local library (or Scarecrow Video if you live near Seattle).  Despite what its trailer may tell you, the most shocking thing about L.I.E. is the fact that it hasn't been heralded as a new classic by now.

~PNK

*Prisoners is easily one of the most snubbed movies at the Oscars this year, only getting nominated for Cinematography.  It's still my second favorite movie of 2013 (after Frances Ha), a grand and harrowing journey through psycho-thriller Hell on par with The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en.


**I'd also recommend the haunting novella Behind the Door by Giorgio Bassani, the author of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

Special Report - FINAL CUT: LADIES & GENTLEMAN (2012)

There are some ideas for movies that everybody has but are never realized - one that's been kicking around my head for years is to make a movie entirely from clips of other movies, building a rudimentary plot from tiny excerpts strung together.  While I conceived it as a psychological thriller, I'm overwhelmingly happy to say that a movie has emerged that is exactly that but is a love story rather than a thriller.  The film is called Final Cut: Ladies & Gentlemen, and it is a "film for educational purposes" (as well as a "recycled film") created by Hungarian director György Pálfi and a team of four editors who created a basic, but moving, love story out of clips from some 450 movies (mostly American and Hungarian).  The idea of making a short film by this method is mind-blowing enough, but Pálfi and company managed to make an 85 minute feature with a comprehensible plot.  After three years of work and several versions, the latest version is receiving a limited theatrical release in the U.S., and I was lucky enough to see it at SIFF Cinema Uptown in Seattle tonight with an overjoyed crowd.

The story is as old as time itself - boy meets girl.  After the opening credits form an image of a man and a woman kissing out of names of famous filmmakers and actors (as well as the ampersand in the subtitle), we follow a series of clips as a man wakes up in the morning, goes out to work and bumps into a woman, and sparks fly immediately.  Along the way they will see conflict, separation, despair and a miraculous renewal, and not a second goes by without some kind of tangible joy exuding from the screen.  The clips range from half a second to 10 or more, and the sources cover practically every famous movie you can think of off the top of your head from The Great Train Robbery to Avatar.  I recognized quite a few movies but a lot of them I didn't, such as all of the Hungarian ones and a lot of Far Eastern movies.  The trick isn't so much that you recognize the source film, but how seamlessly the clips flow together, such as somebody walking through a room shifting perfectly to somebody walking in the same direction towards a phone, or a woman in a 50's kitchen about to touch a pot of something shifting to a clip from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves showing the resolution of that action.  It's because of this meticulous action matching that we are able to follow the plot, and the plot is simple enough that the film doesn't disintegrate into a bad music video.  

While much of the sequencing is empirical and smooth, some of the superimpositions are surprisingly funny.  For example, at one point the woman is at a hospital being shown her baby as an embryo inside of her, and the movie cuts to a shot of the Star Child from 2001.  A set of shots meant to be the same character can suddenly switch to a strikingly different person, and Yoda is used a few times like this to hilarious effect.  The audience, as well as me, was delighted every time a shot of The Addams Family was used, and it's a reminder of just how funny that movie was.  The director restricted himself to using no more than two movies per director, and you can tell what his favorite directors are by the frequent use of clips from Tim Burton (Sleepy Hollow and Beetlejuice; a LOT of clips from Sleepy Hollow), Terry Gilliam (Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) and most strikingly David Lynch, for whom he breaks the rule (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Mulholland Dr.).  I hated every second of Wild at Heart, so much so that I had to shut it off after 15 minutes, so his inclusion of multiple clips from it is the only thing I found irritating about the movie (at least they were vaguely interesting).  He also includes some lesser-known but interesting movies, like Luc Besson's Subway (featuring Highlander's Christopher Lambert with white hair) and Tarsem Singh's The Cell (an underrated favorite of mine), and a handful of animated films (including Spirited Away, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie and Paprika*).  While some predictable filmmakers get featured, like Tarantino, he is able to not overuse them, such as Spielberg and Hitchcock, and one movie in particular, Bram Stoker's Dracula, got used quite a bit, which made me quite happy.


The audience had a blast at my screening, with a lot of laughs as certain famous movies showed their faces (the biggest one arguably with the inclusion of a shot from Species).  They also laughed a lot at an extended sex scene around the 1/3 mark, which includes a few highly explicit shots (like some cunnilingus and an erect, gold-painted penis).  These shots prompted the theater to put up a warning sign on the front door, saying the movie was an "unrated, European film" (a descriptor I find really funny as well as apt, considering how much more laid-back Europe is about sexual content in movies).  There's also some violent content in a fight scene in the first half of the movie, but nothing too graphic.  Teenagers would get a kick out of the movie, and in a better world (or Europe) they'd be able to see it just as easily as adults.  And honestly, everybody should see it.  

I can't remember the last time I had a more astonishing and entertaining theatrical experience as Final Cut, and considering the multitude of possible copyright issues the film could encourage you may never be able to see it again (without some trickery, anyways).  If you live in the Seattle area you can see it at the SIFF Cinema Uptown (down the road from Seattle Center), but hurry, as they're only showing it nine times and two of those have already passed.  Do yourselves a favor: check out the showtimes here and get your butt downtown to see the thing - you may never get another chance and it's more than worth the price of the ticket.  It also comes with Precious Images, a 1986 short film that won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short that year and was made for the 50th anniversary of the Directors Guild of America.  It too is cobbled together from hundreds of movie clips, but has no plot and is much shorter.  It's somewhat cheesier than Final Cut but it's pretty fun and a poignant homage to great film.  Whatever you're doing tomorrow, forget it - go to the 5:00 or 7:00 showings of Final Cut and have the time of your life.  It's the film experience of a lifetime, and you shouldn't let it pass you by.  The clip below doesn't even begin to sum up how great it is.

~PNK

*I'm a huge fan of anime director Satoshi Kon, the mad genius behind Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and Paranoia Agent, but I'm really not a fan of Paprika, which unfortunately appears to be his most popular movie right now (and his untimely death at 47 means that it'll probably stay that way).  The movie is everything that anime's detractors dislike about the industry, and all of his other work does a great job of avoiding those qualities.  Unfortunately, those qualities are more profitable than the stuff I like from his other projects, and that's probably why the movie made it to Hungary in the first place.  Do see those other movies, by the way - really, really awesome stuff.

The Rabbit Hole of Reincarnation - BIRTH (2004)

"Controversial" is one of the most egregiously thrown-around adjectives in all the arts, mostly ensuring a rubbernecker success among films that may or may not have gotten any of that fame without having the label attached to its intentional or word-of-mouth press.  The usual track for controversial movies boils down to middling theatrical runs followed by extended video shelf lives, such as with Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover (which has an impressively inflated out-of-print Amazon price tag).  Some movies are marketed as controversial up front, like The Libertine, and manufacturing controversy often lobs the film into the dustbin of history.  However, it's rare in America for a film to be called controversial before its release, get a severely stunted theatrical run, and piddle away on video, never to be spoken of again.  Birth is one of the most unjust of these cases, as the blasting it received before and upon its release seemed to take its context from what they thought the film was about rather than its actual content.  For those who actually gave it a shot, Birth was, and still is, a hypnotizing, highly stylized and deeply engrossing psychological mystery, exploring how sophisticated adults deal with a seemingly supernatural occurrence, blowing open how they view themselves and the world in the process.

It opens like this -

- an audaciously long shot of a man, Sean, running after giving a speech on the unlikeliness of the afterlife and reincarnation, set to Alexandre Desplat's haunting, magical score, that ends with him having a heart attack under a bridge.  Simultaneously, a child is born.  Ten years later, Sean's wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) is celebrating her engagement to Joseph (Danny Huston), with her old friends Clara (Anne Heche) and her husband Clifford (Peter Stormare) in attendance.  Clara leaves the party, located at Anna's swank Central Park apartment, to worriedly bury a small box in the park - and a young boy named Sean (Cameron Bright), who was hanging out in the lobby, sees her.  The next morning, Sean wakes up in a confused state, and later that day he sneaks into Anna's birthday party despite seemingly having no relation to her.  She requests to see Anna, much to the amusement of Anna and her family, and he says that she's his wife.  She jokes along, but soon realizes that he is dead serious - he claims to be Sean, her husband.  Anna sends him away, assuming he was just goofing with her.  However, he writes her a note and leaves it with the doorman at her apartment building.  She shows it to Joseph and her family, including her mother Eleanor (Lauren Bacall), and they decide that he's just being a weird kid.  That night, Joseph calls the doorman to find out who Sean is, when Sean himself answers the phone, as he was hanging out in the lobby.  His father (Ted Levine) is tutoring somebody in the building, and Joseph takes him to his father to confront him about the situation.  The father demands that Sean leave Anna alone, but he refuses.  Anna and Joseph are getting ready to leave for the opera, and as they walk away Sean falls to his knees in despair.  This makes way for the other astonishing long shot of the film, and the turning point of the plot and Anna's willingness to go down the rabbit hole:

While that setup might have paved the way for something melodramatic and contrived in another movie, Birth keeps us eveloped and guessing while riding a river of elegant restraint.  The director, Jonathan Glazer, is a veteran of music videos and commercials, and his previous film, Sexy Beast (starring Ray Winstone and an utterly terrifying Ben Kingsley), was a fantastic, highly stylized study of a retired mobster's re-descent into crime and its ugly results.  The visuals in Birth are deeply drawn and engrossing, bringing out the spare elegance of wealthy, old-style New York in Winter.  Shots are mostly static and the framing is impeccable, letting the psychology of the situation come to the fore.  Anna's dining room walls are overbearingly green, an ode to the Fauvist art movement around the turn of the century and one of a number of shots well-guidedly inspired by painting.  The acting is perfect, with Anna and the other adults playing off the static photography with roiling confusion, unease and anger, the different reactions interacting beautifully.  Cameron Bright never had the most range as a child actor, but his stone-faced, wise-beyond-his-years delivery gives a mysterious and magnetic presence to his character and his claims.  The music, Alexandre Desplat's sort-of breakout, is the very definition of hypnotic beauty, and it's one of the few soundtrack albums I own (now out of print and going for mucho bucks ;)).  The movie's greatest strength is its ability to reason with an impossible idea with adult logic and come to a stalemate, and a couple of twists make sure that nothing is as it seems and a real resolution may be impossible, a factor which makes the movie endlessly rewatchable.


As per the "controversial" tag - the rumors surrounding the movie before its release questioned whether or not the specter of pedophilia would rear its ugly head.  The filmmakers do bring it up, as a smart, compelling psychodrama would with the subject matter, but it's dealt with in the most tasteful possible way, making the Moral Majority worryworts seem idiotic kneejerkers, which they were.  Unfortunately, this didn't save the movie from getting pulled less than a week into its theatrical run.  The DVD is still around, but it hasn't made much impact, and the whole thing may be why Glazer didn't make another movie until 2013, Under the Skin.  It makes me especially angry, not just because his first two movies are utterly fantastic, but because he had a unique cinematic voice and should be allowed to make as many movies as he sees fit.  Imagine how worse off the film world would be if Paul Thomas Anderson's career got snuffed after Boogie Nights because of the shot of Dirk Diggler's fake penis at the end.  Anyways, you shouldn't give two craps about the moral guardians who pressured the film out of release - they obviously hadn't seen the movie and shouldn't have had any power over distributors in the first place.  Birth is a fascinating and perfectly crafted psychological mystery that deserves all the praise it can get - so give it a spin and praise as you will.

~PNK

Evil Embryos and Funny Masks - THE JOHNSONS (1992)

I'm a huge sucker for fictional religions and cults.  I was raised with ancient Greek mythology and tend to go nuts whenever a Greek pantheon movie comes out (like the recent, underrated Immortals).  I also get a huge kick out of movies that depict Christian cosmology and the dense mythology of Catholocism, however successfully.  For my money, the coolest stuff is movies that either tinker with the Catholic mythos (John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, the staggering Giulio Paradisi-Ovidio Assonitis mindscrew The Visitor) or create new mythologies - it should come as no surprise that Ghostbusters is one of my favorite movies.  Keeping the latter in mind, The Johnsons was right up my alley and turned out to be a wickedly creative and very fun cult-prophecy horror flick, and probably the only horror movie from the Netherlands you're likely to see.

The movie begins with a narrator telling us of an anthropologist's 1930's expedition to study the Mahxitu tribe in the Amazon.  The tribe worshiped Xangadix, a god of pure evil who would beget seven sons who would bring eternal darkness to the world through an incestuous ritual.  The professor disappeared, and decades later a trunk of his studies would wind up in Amsterdam, to be unearthed by Surinamese anthropology Professor Keller.  21 years before he does, a Dr. Johnson performs the c-section birth of male septuplets (uh...), complete with a shot inside the womb, and that night goes out to the Biesbosch National Park to smear mud on his face and summon the Embryo of Xangadix (...oh), which rises out of the swamp with fire surrounding it.  In the present, the professor examines the expedition materials with no help from his witch doctory father, who tries to destroy any records of Xangadix he can find.  He is also rudely tasked by a secret government agency to help deal with seven male siblings (hmm...) who committed a horrible massacre at age 7 and were committed, now at the whim of the state as the sanitarium is being closed.  The men never speak and once tore one of the guards apart, drawing symbols on the wall in his blood.  Meanwhile, a newspaper photographer is assigned to try to photograph the rare night heron in the Biesbosch, and her nearly 14-year-old daughter tags along.  The daughter has been having unsettling dreams involving bald young boys drawing blood symbols on walls, as well as being ritualistically gang-bred by naked men wearing hilarious masks, and not-so-coincidentally she's been worried about how late her first period is becoming.  With everything that's been going on she should be a heck of a lot more worried.

While I don't think The Johnsons is truly scary it is really damn fun, and with a movie this nifty fun is a very welcome adjective.  This is crowd pleasing stuff - inventive, bloody and action packed - and it's much smarter than your average junk-horror rental.  The movie could have sustained itself on its ideas alone, but fortunately for us the acting is top notch and it's very well made, the look rising above its obvious shot-on-video-then-processed-by-Film-Look appearance.  While the horror and action is taken seriously it's pretty funny; the narrator at the beginning ends his tale of the doomed expedition by saying "Holy Shit!", and a character kills a villain via TV set, then blows the end of the remote control as if it was a gun barrel.  It's the kind of movie Midnight screenings were made for, a dang good time with Guts 'n' Laffs (and the Embryo!) that doesn't overstay its welcome.  Anchor Bay released a special edition DVD some years ago, so the next time you've got too much popcorn to eat by yourself round up some friends and give The Johnsons a spin.  Just don't ask why there's a garbage strike in Amsterdam that has nothing to do with anything.

~PNK

Nightmare's Balancing Act - THE APPOINTMENT (1981)

Horror has long been a genre for hopeful directors to get some moviemaking experience in before going on to "better things", mostly because horror movies can be maid cheaply and are almost guaranteed to make money, and if there's a movie you don't want to lose money it's the first one you get out of the gate.  The lineage of directors who got their start in horror includes such luminaries as Francis Ford Coppola (Dementia 13) and Oliver Stone (Seizure), but not all of them made the leap, such as Carnival of Souls director Herk Harvey.  While Harvey had a steady career he returned to and has resurfaced for interviews and retrospectives, Lindsey C. Vickers, director of The Appointment (1981), only had a couple more appearances working for Channel 4 and then disappeared completely, his sole feature film languishing in obscurity.  I first saw The Appointment a few years ago and was completely floored - it's one of the most unusual and effective horror movies I've ever seen, and its non-presence among genre fandom is a crime.  Much like Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Appointment is a film best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible, but its value is so great it would be worse not to talk about it.

"THREE YEARS AGO"...after a school orchestra rehearsal wraps up a young girl takes a forest shortcut home.  An ominous, classified police report talks about a mysterious disappearance of a teenage girl, and soon enough the girl on screen starts hearing voices and growls from the bushes.  She's suddenly pulled into the trees, and the camera focuses on her smashed violin.  "...THREE YEARS LATER" we see teenager Joanne (Samantha Weysom), the star violinist at the same school, returning home to tell her parents Ian (Edward Woodward) and Dianna (Jane Merrow) about her upcoming violin recital with the orchestra.  Before she gets home she stops by the trail the girl disappeared from, now blocked by a tall iron fence, and talks to someone on the other side which we can't see.  Her Dad Ian has to go out of town for a business trip and will miss the concert, but breaking this news to her is a delicate task.  Joanne is a bit...attached to her father, in a very immature, childish way and perhaps more.  The night before he leaves, Ian and Dianna have a series of unsettling dreams, and rottweilers mysteriously make their way into their house and strange things happen. Ian leaves early the next morning, and what happens on his trip is creepy, surprising and aesthetically fascinating.

While that's not much of a set-up on paper, the horror in The Appointment is drawn out of small details, running symbology, and mounting dread.  The uncomfortable relationship between Ian and Joanna is an odd starting point for a horror movie, and the directions the movie goes with that unspoken truth is magnetically unnerving and wholly unexpected.  It's hard to explain exactly what happens in the movie without wrecking the whole thing because on paper it doesn't look like much happens, but what does happen is some of the most masterful horror moments of the time.  For example, the climax involves a kind of set piece that has shown up in countless other movies, but in Vickers's hands it becomes the most intense, detailed and terrifying example of its type, such an insane sequence that you think the movie wouldn't be able to top it...and then the coda knocks you on your ass.  Edward Woodward is well-loved by horror fans for his impassioned performance in Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man, and his performance in The Appointment is a fine compliment, his arc a composed, practical man being sucked into a vortex of mystery and terror.  Jane Merrow as Dianna isn't in much of the movie, but her role is essential and her performance is perfectly placed.  I can't say that Samantha Weysom, who plays Joanne, is any great shakes, but she was a teenager and the film was a small production, and it can be counted among the film's few faults.


The movie is really built upon its production, a brilliant combination of cinematography, music, editing, sound design and pacing that shows an enormous talent in Vickers.  If any of these things was out of place the mood would have broken and the audience would have immediately been taken out of the story.  It's so skillfully made that I'm very frustrated that Vickers dropped off the face of the Earth.  Unable to secure theatrical distribution due to its confusing structure and defiance of horror tropes, The Appointment was quietly dumped onto video (3M Video in England, Sony Video Software in America) and has never been reissued in any form.  Vickers later did work at the BBC, producing the miniseries Zastrozzi: A Romance (based upon a novel by Percy Shelley) and co-producing the Aardman short Babylon (directed by Peter Lord and David Sproxton, both behind Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit), both in 1986.  The only other credit is The Lake, a 33-minute short film Vickers made in 1978, shot in 11 days for 28,000 pounds and shown in front of screenings of the Chuck Norris movie A Force of One (because lame cop thrillers should always be preceded by atmospheric horror shorts).  I found an article written after a 2012 screening as part of BFI's Flipside festival, and if anybody has a copy of the film or knows where I can find it I'll give them a million Monopoly dollars.


While The Appointment has the good fortune to be a horror movie made in the 80's it's a far cry from the kinds of popcorn flicks that are such a booming cult market today.  It's much more akin to horror practices of the 70's, and in my mind is the last example of a film genre that has never before been defined but needs to be talked about.  I call it Psycho-Aestheticism - films in the genre used psychological and paranoid stories as launching pads for unique horror experiences driven by heightened film technique, symbology and aesthetic intoxication.  Rather than rely on monsters, violence and sleaze, Psycho-Aestheticist movies built dread through sight and sound experiences, banking heavily on mystery and beauty to let the audiences' mind expand upon the film's story and ideas.  I've written about two Psycho-Aestheticist movies before - Let's Scare Jessica to Death and Symptoms - but there are many others (mostly from the mid-60's through the mid-70's), including Roman Polanski's Repulsion, Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf and Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now.  The 70's was a time of unparalleled freedom for horror directors, as the old studio standards had nearly collapsed and no huge successes had set marketable trends (like Halloween and Friday the 13th would at the end of the decade).  An odd link between these films is how the directors didn't spend much time in the horror genre, instead ducking in to make a film or two and then moving on to other things.  The singular nature of these films could be attributed to that interloping, the filmmakers more concerned with making a movie than a Horror Movie.  That singularity also ensures the difficulty in marketing these movies, and many of them have had neglectful distribution or were simply forgotten about.  For example, look at that idiotic video box at the top of the article.  Not only is the cover chintzy as hell (though endearing in its cheapness, like the box for Ethan) the blurb on the back is extremely misleading and was probably written by somebody who'd never seen the movie.  

I'll cover a few more Psycho-Aestheticist movies in the future (*cough* Images *cough*), suffice to say that none of them were made any later than The Appointment.  The genre film landscape changed dramatically in the 80's, with horror a more codified industry and distributors more conservative, and a fright flick that emphasized slow burn atmosphere over violence didn't stand a chance.  Heck, this movie didn't stand a chance, and it's high time it got a DVD release or at least showed up at a festival or two.  I've watched it several times now and every time I find some new detail to admire, and while I think I've got a pretty good idea as to what it all means I'd love to debate with fellow viewers.  It's a movie worth debating, a totally unique horror experiment that holds up just as well today as it did 33 years ago.  If you're worried about having to drop $14 on the ancient VHS, don't worry - somebody thankfully uploaded the whole thing to YouTube.

(This is part 1 of 7; when the video ends find the next part in the "watch next" screen.)

~PNK

The Depths of Wild Imagination - INDICTMENT: THE MCMARTIN TRIAL (1995)

HBO is spoiled these days, what with all the good shows and TV movies confined to pay walled-in channels and the premium channels winning ALL the Emmys.  Back in the Dark Ages (the 90's) only a handfull of shows ever broke into the mainstream, the big winner being Mr. Show, until The Sopranos came along and changed the channel's fortunes forever.  I covered another 90's movie of their's in my review of The Second Civil War, and today we're looking at another hidden gem - Indictment: The McMartin Trial.  Executive Produced by Oliver Stone and starring James Woods and Mercedes Ruehl, Indictment has never seen the exposure you think its names would warrant, and it's doubly odd considering the ridiculous true story it faithfully documented, the longest and most expensive criminal trial in US history, one that sparked a nationwide panic but resulted in zero guilty verdicts and went down as a textbook example of mass hysteria.

In the mid-'80's, a horrifyed mother calls to report that her local preschool, run by the trusted and longstanding McMartin/Buckey family, has been physically and sexually abusing her son as part of Satanic rituals.  The family is arrested and the 200 or so children in the class are taken to an innovative child abuse therapy center, Children's Institute International, to be questioned by a counselor.  As the media frenzy grows, attorney Danny Davis (James Woods), a man used to defending drug dealers and society's rejects, sees through the media blitz and takes on their defense, partially to uphold the American virtue of "innocent until proven guilty" but more because it's a "hell of a case."  That hellfulness also attracts prosecuting attorney Lael Rubin (Mercedes Ruehl), and their first meeting is one of adversarial ribbing and snickering at the prospect of their careers skyrocketing as a result of the trial.  Their adversarying can't equal the wide smiling of CII's head Kee MacFarlane (Lolita Davidovich), obviously quite proud of her work wringing accusations out of the children.  Everybody, with the notable exception of Davis, is quick to accept the increasingly outrageous accusations, and Davis points immediately to the huge-framed 80's glasses sported by Virginia McMartin (Sada Thompson), teacher Peggy Buckey (Shirley Knight) and her son Ray (Henry Thomas), the latter of which Davis says "looks like a child molester."


As the hearings and investigations from both sides get underway it becomes increasingly apparent that not only does all the prosecution's evidence consist the testimony of small children, the children's statements are bizarre to the point of farce.  One claims that the Buckeys killed a horse with a baseball bat; another claims they flew the kids on an airplane, then says they went to a car wash instead, then says the car had no windows.  A boy claims that a man put his penis inside the boy's penis.  When shown a row of possible molesters, another boy identifies a City Council member and Chuck Norris as participating Satanists.  The one that sends the media into the most uproar is one overenthusiastic boy's claim that everybody dressed in black robes and sacrificed a rabbit, drinking its blood.  And to think that some townspeople had set fire to the preschool before the trial even started - thank God the family was protected from the outside.


All of CII's sessions were videotaped, and as Davis looks over the sessions he notices something very striking - the techniques used by the therapists are less encouraging the truth and more coercing the right answers out.  His hypothesis is that the therapists were fed a general claim of abuse from the parents or some officials and used any means necessary to get the kids to admit to the claims, oftentimes saying that all their friends were smart for telling them they were abused, and "you don't want to be stupid, do you?"  The kids were also shown dolls with anatomically detailed (ahem) dolls meant to represent the Buckeys, accompanied by remarks as to how Peggy's breasts had lines on them, and in one instance a kid is encouraged to slam the doll on the table.  It's very clear to not only Davis but one of the prosecution's investigators that the children are being led on, most likely afraid that if they don't say what the adults want that it will get them in trouble, and the hearings show just how easy it is to lead these young witnesses.  That doesn't stop the judge from blatantly favoring the prosecution, allowing their questioning while letting objections stick on the defense's countering.  All of this actually convinces the prosecuting investigator to resign, leaving Rubin in a state of righteous frustration that only grows as the trial progresses.  Davis's case only grows in the process, skillfully piercing holes in not only CII's techniques and MacFarlane's credibility as a social worker but also demolishing a witness who claimed that Ray admitted to sodomizing children and successfully turning the preferential tables not only for the judge but the jury and the audience.  The most entertaining part of all of this is when Rubin begins her personality attack on Ray, citing his interest in "pyramid power."  I won't dare spoil it for you, except to say it's incredibly funny and produces some of the best lines in the movie.


It's important to note that the mother who made the first accusations, the claims upon which the whole case is based, was a severe alcoholic and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, a fact that the prosecution deliberately hid from the defense.  It's also important to note that she died from alcohol poisoning before the trial even started, and the entire ordeal, from the arrests through the final, merciful ending, lasted seven years and resulted in zero guilty verdicts.  It ended up being the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history, a doubly ridiculous fact considering that nobody went to jail for it, though the Buckeys most of that time in prison anyways.  To the delight of docudrama fans Indictment is just about the most accurate representation of the real trial as you're likely to see on film, and even the most ludicrous elements are completely true to life.  I've read reviews of the movie that accuse it of being one-sided, but how can it be anything else when the accusations are patently false?  What, did these reviewers really think that there was a Satanist conspiracy bent on molesting children and ritual sacrifice?  There are real Satanist organizations in America that the police could have talked to at any time, such as The Church of Satan, and none of them have any kind of abusive or sacrificial agenda and are in fact pretty harmless in the grand scheme of things.


The case marked the turning point in the public's willingness to believe in Satanist conspiracy horsehockey, and Indictment was the final nail in the moral panic's coffin.  The movie is incredibly well done for a TV movie, its filming style reminiscent of Oliver Stone's over-the-top style familiar to viewers of JFK and Natural Born Killers but knowingly restrained.  The performances are excellent, with Woods and Ruehl in top form and the supporting cast fully committed and at times heart-wrenching.  James Woods is one of my favorite actors and he was born to play this kind of role, a third-banana lawyer who uses his smarts and rhetoric to not only win over the jury but redeem his unillustrious career defending drug dealers and scumbags.  Henry Thomas, who plays Ray, gets the most well-developed arc in the movie and his performance is the most compelling of the film, quite remarkable for an actor I've never paid much attention to (the only role I'd seen him in before was as Amsterdam's best friend in Gangs of New York).  The movie is shot much more like a theatrical film than a TV show, and the camera is free to sweep and accentuate the story beyond our TV-movie expectations.


The true story of the McMartin trial is a fascinating portrait of the peak and decline of one of the most idiotic moral panics this side of rainbow parties, and the movie does the facts great justice while making its own identity as an entertaining and tense courtroom drama.  If you've got a spare slightly-more-than-two-hours and can secure a copy you're in for a true-story ride on the same level as docudrama masterpieces like Zodiac and All the President's Men.  You've got my guarantee that at no point will Chuck Norris show up to put his penis inside your child's penis.

~PNK