A Dark and Empty Dream - CHICAGO JOE AND THE SHOWGIRL (1990)

"This is a true story.  No names have been changed.  No events have been altered."  This declarative opening text is set against layers of theater curtains that withdraw against a gothic soundtrack.  Already, our trust in the film's truth is put on edge.  A scene is revealed of a lavish movie premiere, where Betty Jones (Emily Lloyd) poses and flashes her smile for throngs of fans and press.  Her gaze is captured by a large news camera, and drawn in, and we dissolve into a bedroom where Jones, in real life, is merely fantasizing about silver screen glory.  It's London in 1944, and Jones piddles away her small life through poor work and frequent movie-going - her favorites are American gangster pictures, with glamorous stars committing dirty deeds to celluloid.  While she has no chance of meeting Fred McMurray in her daily drudge, the next best thing happenstances into her: Karl Holten (Kiefer Sutherland), a young American serviceman with the swagger and stories of someone accomplished of both official and surreptitious careers.  Holten says he's an officer, frequently engaged in secret missions, and a gangster while in America; Jones says she's an actress.  Both of them drink in their mutual attraction and need for someone to indulge their fantasies, and start spending late nights tooling around in a military truck looking for action.  Holten has no intention of telling Jones that the truck is stolen, and that he's a deserter, certainly no more than her desire to tell him she's worked as a stripper.  Also absent is that Jones has another lover, a nice young woman with a nice family who think he's merely on leave.  Jones delights in his willingness to engage in petty crime to please her, such as ripping the fur coat off of a stranger and smashing into buildings, and he delights in having an impressionable waif to dazzle, even if their misadventures have them dodging catastrophes of a London landscape still in the throes of the blitz.  With nobody watching them too closely, they let their crimes escalate, at least until they pick up a hitchhiking woman with a plan to rob her, then things go terribly south.  And this brush with fatal destiny will only cool them off, until one night when they take out a cabbie, and all their fantasies come to an end...

One of my favorite films is Paperhouse, a 1988 fantasy film about a girl who draws while stuck sick in bed, then dreams of visiting the literal landscape of her drawings.  Seeing it for the first time in college was an important event, as it was one of the first and most important pieces of evidence I had that there were fantastic movies out there that very few people knew about.  Its ingenious concept, visual invention and directorial intensity are still remarkable today, and I made a point of seeking out more films by its director, Bernard Rose.  Rose had come to Paperhouse from the world of music videos, such as the provocative video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax", and the stretch of films he made shortly after Paperhouse were rich with visual presence.  Rose's two best-known films were released in the early-to-mid '90s: the classic horror film Candyman, and Immortal Beloved, the only good Beethoven movie.  After his 1996 adaptation of Anna Karenina bombed with critics and audiences, he left Hollywood behind to make small indie films on digital video, and has never returned to film and big budgets.  That wasn't his first major flop, however, as he had another crater in his rear-view: Chicago Joe and the Showgirl, an ambitious period piece with hot young stars, teeing itself up to be British cinema's answer to Bonnie & Clyde and slicing into a water trap.

There were certainly many reasons the people behind this film thought it would be a success, not the least the talent and draw of its lead actors, Kiefer Sutherland and Emily Lloyd.  Sutherland had been riding high from acclaimed performances in Stand By Me, The Lost Boys and Young Guns, and brings the ideal energy to this sort of character.  Karl Holten is a hard shell around a quivering core, and Sutherland has the range and looks to swing between amoral flash and boyish fragility - Holten is a case study in how much mileage certain men can get with themselves, and certain women, playing the confident villain.  Equally well cast is Emily Lloyd, who had wowed critics a couple of years earlier in the sad, absorbing period drama Wish You Were Here.  Lloyd was only 16 when filming it, and is both exasperating and sympathetic as a bored, wild teenager who screws up with an older man and is forced to grow up faster than anyone should.  That performance trained her especially well for this one, a similarly bored and unruly young woman who throws herself into criminality because it's viscerally elevating from the bleakness of her London life.  And to their credit, both actors are as excellent as they are able to be - but then there is the nagging problem of the script, and the direction's failure to improve on its weaknesses and marry the various elements into a compelling whole.

As I alluded to in my opening, and what is apparent from the first frames of the film, is that Rose and company have elected for a grandly artificial approach to scenery, music and storytelling.  Rose brings his great strength of swinging between fantasy and reality to this picture, and Chicago Joe is plush with bold visual concepts that both depict the dark fantasies of the characters, and scene-set their real lives in a London of modern myth.  Everything is shot on soundstages, and the sets are deliberately stagey - cityscapes are shown through matte paintings and miniatures, rich in dark blues and blacks and featuring numerous barrage balloons.  Production designer Gemma Jackson had created the stunning, surreal sets and props for Paperhouse, and this is another showcase of her great vision.  This is a picture-book blitz-era London, resembling Tim Burton's Gotham City more than anything in England; that colossal smash was released while this film was in production, and one can't help but think they were influenced by its gothic neo-noir approach to the urban.  It's also an apt comparison because Shirley Walker, who wrote the film's score, would go on to score more than 30 episodes of Batman: The Animated Series.  Walker had to share billing with Hans Zimmer for legal reasons, but the score was all hers, and it deserves wider recognition than it has gotten.  Sure, there is a lot of big-band stuff, appropriate for the likes of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy film of the same year, but one recurring piece breaks my heart: the elegiac love theme, reminiscent both of the climax of Strauss's Death and Transfiguration and Dominic Muldowney's orchestral score for Michael Radford's film of Nineteen Eighty-Four.  But they just don't quite adhere into an emotional whole.

I've seen lots of movies that swing between hard reality and the delusions of their characters, and the successful ones all work to make the real world feel real enough for us to move from it assuredly into the unreal.  However, Chicago Joe's version of wartime London is performatively fake, and subject to nearly as many directorial flourishes and dream-like corners as the material we infer as the characters' imaginings, and as such we lack the grounding required for us to empathize with the people that inhabit either world.  Rose's desire for visual sweep tends to get in the way of proper cinematic storytelling, and moments of flair tend to fall flat if they aren't concerned with Holten's criminal acts.  One scene shows Jones looking out her bedroom window, watching for Holten to arrive for another nighttime trek; Holten never comes, as he's spending the evening with his other girl.  This could have been a great scene showing Jones being betrayed by her own expectations of a man who cares less about her than he lets on, but the film uses the scene to zoom away from her face, as she blithely sings to herself, until we see her whole apartment building and the horizon behind it, all cluttered rooftops, balloons and spotlights.  What the darkened cityscape has to say for her emotional state, or even the story's themes, I can't say, and it's just one of many moments where the film's style distracts rather than enhances.

And ultimately, what the style would be enhancing is a story of people staving off boredom and existential fears by lying to each other and committing pointless crimes - this concept requires an extremely observant eye on human character and the thickets of morality and historical contexts, and neither Rose nor the script had such an eye.  The audience certainly sees what is happening, and the liabilities of lovedrunk abandon and sociopathy, but they're never brought to care about what happens to either of the leads.  These are a Bonnie & Clyde who fail to bewitch us with charisma, and never draw us to feel their tragedy with convincing vulnerabilities - the stakes are too low, and when they are finally caught they spend most of their time afterwards merely disappointed rather than distraught.  Other films with peculiarly heartless protagonists in true crime stories rely on supporting characters for insight and emotional anchoring, but the other people in Holten and Jones's London are slim sketches, having no personalities beyond their thumbnail descriptors.  With few anchors in the story or visuals, we are left apathetic, muttering about how much material grandeur was squandered on such a tepid movie.

This article is a bit of a departure, as I normally write articles for movies I consider wholly worthwhile; however, the positive aspects of Chicago Joe and the Showgirl make it worth a wide reappraisal.  Plenty of big-budgeted films that initially failed have found respectable latter-day audiences, some earnest fans and others rubberneckers, and Chicago Joe may yet gather both crowds.  A good companion film to this may be Neil Jordan's 1989 remake of We're No Angels, a similarly ambitious period piece with lush visuals and music that fell like a lead barrage balloon.  That film left viewers perplexed with its mix of light and dark humor, affectionate parody of classic film acting, and religious themes, and was not the way Jordan wanted to enter into Hollywood.  It certainly has its share of faults, but is an interesting attempt nonetheless, and I enjoy it for its ambition and curious elements.  There is a lot to admire in Chicago Joe's production, and Sutherland and Lloyd are swinging for the fences, though I wouldn't go into this with high expectations of emotional engagement.  Indeed, I appear to be in a serious minority in liking the film at all, and it wouldn't be hard to convince me that I only care about it because I want another Bernard Rose movie to be great.  I'm also likely in a minority of people by wishing it would get a video rerelease, as the last time it was available in the USA was for a no-frills, fullscreen DVD from Artisan Entertainment, now long OOP.  This is a film that would do splendidly on Blu-Ray, where 1080p would let us see the depths of all those beautiful sets and we might get to see Rose, Sutherland and Lloyd talk about a collective dream of theirs that didn't find its audience.  It would also be nice for Lloyd to get renewed interest for the brief time she was in the spotlight; a number of unfortunate factors, including mental health problems, dragged her away from what could have been a promising career, and I cherish the few times I've seen her at her peak.

Another favorite film of mine is The Fall, the 2006 masterpiece of Indian-American director Tarsem Singh.  The Fall was a huge undertaking, costing millions of the director's own dollars and shot in a couple dozen countries, and has a similar gimmick of two lonely characters spinning fantasy together in order to bear the dreariness of their daily existences.  However, we care deeply for them, and the movie is a triumph of imagination and humanity.  Singh, like Rose, started out directing music videos, including the striking video for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion", and was aware of how the format worked and how different narrative fiction is.  In the behind-the-scenes footage for The Fall, we see Singh talking about how important the core characters, and their relationship to each other, were, saying (paraphrased) "If that doesn't work, this is just a 25-million-dollar music video."  Music videos are meant to adorn musical substance with concentrated style, and rarely have the time to function as stories unto themselves.  Perhaps Rose wasn't equipped at the time to do the hard work of choosing the right directorial moves for what the story needed, a process that frequently involves sacrificing exciting ideas to let the one right tool do its job.  Maybe it is just a 5-million-pound music video, one that made less than $200,000 back.  But it still has a place in my heart, even if I can't defend the reasons why beyond its style and stars, pedigree and potential.  In my book, it's always better to fail reaching beyond one's grasp than from a lack of effort, and even if Chicago Joe's dream didn't result in great returns and reviews, at least it wasn't as ruinous a disaster as the dreams of its protagonists.

~PNK

My Cinematic Yearbook - Betrayed (1988)

Be it for misplaced self-importance, misguided metaphysical probing or just jadedness, I've made an effort to consume the art that was released in my birthyear, 1988.  Sometimes that can lead to tears but fortunately there were a lot of great movies released that year, such as Akira, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Naked Gun, Rain Man, Dead Ringers and one of my all-time favorite movies, the blogworthy Paperhouse.  '88 also featured a number of great flicks that have fallen by the wayside or were undervalued upon their release and by dang that's what home video was invented to fix, so every now and then I'll review a Crazy 88 that needs another peep, and there's a timeliness in reviewing the first one of these, Betrayed.  Actually, it's not a fortunate timeliness, as not only do I have to talk about racism but I have to talk about Trump.  

Of the many, many gaffs Donald Trump has made so far in his presidential race, taking time to carefully avoid discrediting a former KKK Grand Wizard on the air while whipping out blanket condemnations of Mexicans is pretty memorable, doubly memorable as it forces us to remember that the KKK and other White Supremacy groups are still alive and kickin'.  Hollywood has long hated groups like this, with the KKK appearing in plenty of movies like The Blues Brothers and Mississippi Burning, but less colorful terrorist groups like the Aryan Brotherhood have appeared a bit less frequently though are equally hated.  I think that infrequency is due to the AB appearing less like a cult or old-fashioned men's club than the KKK, more human, easier to see someone joining.  Groups like that don't immediately declare their political leanings but rather insinuate new members in by initially appearing as a group of friends with similar backgrounds, and the fact that they're close enough to "normal" people to pass makes them slightly more problematic targets as a whole for writers.  It's this fine line that Betrayed walks with total assurance, making it one of the most emotionally brutal political dramas of it's time.

In response to the assassination of Midwestern shock jock Sam Kraus (Richard Libertini), the FBI sends agent Cathy Weaver (Debra Winger) undercover as a combine driver to investigate a prime suspect, farmer Gary Simmons (Tom Berenger), Vietnam vet and single father.  Cathy's search for evidence is initially unfruitful, not helped by her decision to feign romantic interest in Gary, but Gary decides to take her "hunting" one night and she sees the truth - Gary and his friends are militant White Supremacists and their "hunting" trips are training sessions where they set a captured black man loose in order to shoot him down.  Cathy, distraught over how her duty to her cover kept her from saving the man, wants to bail on the mission but her bosses, among them her former lover Michael Carnes (John Heard) press her to go further in order to connect Gary to the assassination.  Things only get deeper, and more difficult to control or rectify, from there.

This formula is tried-'n'-true Hollywood logline, certainly understandable as the script was written by Joe "Showgirls" Eszterhas, a fact that surprised me after I found out, but the subject matter and execution are deeply disturbing, just as it should be.  I don't care how jaded you are, seeing little kids being taught to shoot rifles at racist cutouts in the middle of a White Supremacist training camp is upsetting on a trillion levels, not to mention when Gary's Kindergarten-aged daughter says "We're the good guys.  One day we're gonna kill all the dirty niggers and the Jews and everything's gonna be neat."  The mark of good acting in these kinds of films is if the actors can say horrifying lines like not only without flinching but with such banality as if they say it each Sunday to their town's pastor.  Winger and Berenger both pull off their not-so-dual roles expertly, Berenger's performance being especially important as he comes across both as a determined killer and a decently charming guy and good father, a concept that is impossible to fathom for most people, the film's FBI included.  Winger exudes a lot of internal strength and integrity throughout, something that makes her gradual emotional destruction hurt even more, and the excellent supporting cast, including Ted Levine, John Mahoney and David Clennon, play their tunes with timing and style.  Unlike much of Joe Eszterhas's work Betrayed has an overabundance of subtle characterization, quiet moments and raw truth, aspects that have aged considerably well in the nearly 30 years since the film's release.  The director, Costa-Gavras, might be familiar to those with an eye on international cinema as he directed the smash-hit political thriller Z as well as the smack-in-the-face gripping The Confession, and this film shows him staying true to his roots inside a Hollywood framework.  His eye is expansive and swift, the camera neither lagging behind the action or distracting with flash, and features some exceptional magic-hour photography in the Great Plains.  His patience and knack for building momentum on simple moments result in some lovely small moments, such as a scene early in the film where Cathy watches Gary chew out some other farmers.  It's the first time Gary shows his true, clear-eyed hostility and the shot is Cathy's perspective, focusing on the back of Gary's head - a no-no in traditional filmmaking but a fine detail here.  The only thing that doesn't hold up anymore is the music, synth-'n'-country-heavy and too often weakening the impact (a problem not shared by the near-contemporaneous synth score to Mississippi Burning), as well as some usual plot dubiousness that comes with any undercover operative story, but the class production more than makes up for it.  Why did the slow dissolve cut go out of style again?  For that matter, why doesn't anybody remember that the '80's had just as many great dramas as comedies and horror films?

Betrayed didn't get the best reviews when it came out, nor the most viewers, and Costa-Gavras's Hollywood career would flame out a few years later with the colossal flop that was Mad City.  It didn't really turn around on video, either, and the slew of underwhelming promotional art show that its distributor, MGM, has never had a clue as to how to market it.  I can understand why some people wouldn't like it simply for the idea that the protagonist finds herself unable to completely side against such repugnant antagonists, but that impossible situation is part of what makes great drama and it's a heart-wrenching way to confront how even the most philosophically repulsive people are still people.  We need more films that show sympathetic people who've painted themselves into philosophically and emotionally impossible corners, not only in spite of the fact that these movies aren't exactly crowd-pleasers but precisely because of their difficult provocation of thought.  Berenger went on the record years later and admitted that it's his favorite movie, a move that might come across as hideously self-important as he starred in the thing but rung true to me, especially as he defended the film by saying "It was exactly what it was meant to be."  Like it or not, you can't deny that Betrayed thrusts the viewer into the heart of the ugliest side of American identity as intelligently and empathetically as anyone could expect, and I for one appreciate the effort.

~PNK

The Sewer Rocking the Boat - THE GHOULS (2003)

If you're like me you're a big fan of the Gyllenhaals (and pine for more movies with both Jake and Maggie, preferably playing siblings a la Donnie Darko) and shrieked with delight, as well as fear, at Jake's amazingly creepy turn as the petty-thief-turned-TV-news-stringer Louis Bloom in last year's brilliant Nightcrawler.  Arguably 2014's best mainstream film after Birdman, Nightcrawler did an unbelievable job introducing the world to the horrific possibilities of gathering lurid footage for local news outlets...or so the producers thought.  That's not a knock on Nightcrawler's quality, just a note that it wasn't the first movie to look at L.A. news stringers in a less than flattering light.  A much smaller film, The Ghouls, snuck out on video a decade earlier after modest festival circulation and never became well-known enough to be forgotten.  I would've never seen it if not for a handy positive review by Fred Adelman over at his indispensable genre film review site Critical Condition.  With only a few days left before Halloween I felt it a welcome obligation to get the reviews back up and running to spotlight a few horror flicks that needed more recognition, and The Ghouls is a sucker-punch way to get into the spirit.  While Nightcrawler drew its viewers into its creeps gradually and got a lot of unsettling material with great restraint, The Ghouls leaps right for the jugular and then sells it to the 6 A.M. block for easy ratings.

Eric Hayes (Timothy Muskatell) scratches out a living filming grisly crimes and their aftermaths for sale to local news outlets, and less than two minutes into the movie is found filming a man stab his naked girlfriend to death while their baby cries in the corner.  Almost everybody he knows despises him, including the producers he sells his tapes to and possibly even his girlfriend Sue (Tina Birchfield).  One night while stumbling to his car after a good boozing he sees a woman being dragged into an alley, and he runs to her with his camera expecting a juicy mugging or rape.  What he sees instead is a bunch of dirty, barely human beings eating her alive, and not only does he barely make it out unscathed but he had the misfortune of forgetting to put a tape into his camera.  Desperate to get evidence of urban cannibals on film, he promises big results to one of his news clients and decides to follow any lead he can to find his perps.  The only thing is, the only people willing to talk about them are scared to death and lead him into the sewers, and not even the news is ready for what he might find...

Shot on grainy digital video and drowning in unpalatable subject matter and visuals, The Ghouls is one of the bleakest and grimiest films I've ever seen about the dark side of media.  Eric Hayes is about as anti as a hero gets, more than willing to let people get attacked and even killed for a chance at profitable footage and lashing out at people who criticize him for it.  What's so fascinating is how the film makes you sympathize with him despite his obvious flaws, his curiosity and willingness to plunge into darkness to find out the truth about L.A.'s seediest underbelly making him compellingly human against a decidedly inhuman threat.  Let's be clear here - this film could easily be pitched as Nightcrawlers meets C.H.U.D. and in no way is that a bad thing, as it manages to synthesize the better themes of both films and carve out its own identity in the process.  You might be thinking that a 2003 movie shot on digital video, and exclusively at night, might be unpleasant to look at, but thankfully writer-director Chad Ferrin, has a fine eye for shot composition and remembered to bring some good lighting.  A lot of movies shot on video can't help but look like the director secretly shot his friends goofing off using a hidden camera in his glasses, but Ferrin manages to shoot The Ghouls so professionally that it's easy to forget you're watching a medium that wouldn't start looking really good for years.  Ferrin, a Troma graduate, managed to write a script that's both intelligent and engaging but also allows for the production to be as cheap and minimal as possible, as all its characters live and work in hovels and the actors probably wore their own clothes while shooting.  What he saved on sets and costumes he made up for in good gore effects and a good casting director, as with a film this cheap everybody needs to be pitch perfect right away and there's not a whiffed performance in the house.  Especially notable is Timothy Muskatell as Eric, an actor whose most mainstream role has been a supporting role in  Deadgirl yet he brings a real intelligence and heart to a role that desperately needs its empathetic qualities proven rather than just shown.  There's also an eerie-yet-minimal free-jazz-meets-tomandandy to heighten the caustic danger of the story, with most of the film letting the droning din of a nocturnal urban landscape immerse us in dread.  And then there's that soul-crushing last line.  I mean, damn.

With its graphic violence and depressing story, The Ghouls might look like a hard sell - don't let it be.  The smart script, solid direction, excellent acting and good pacing all make The Ghouls way more enjoyable than you might be expecting, crafting a minor horror classic out of limited means and stark realism.  Is it better than Nightcrawler?  No, but what recent movie is?  Is it better than C.H.U.D.I?  Well, I don't know, but C.H.U.D. wasn't exactly perfect, either (but was still way better than C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud).  You've got a little more time in your Halloween viewing block, don't you?  Here, I'll sweeten the deal - its distributor threw it up on YouTube in full for free.  How's that for grabbing your attention?

~PNK

Special Report - ANGST (1983)

Back when I first started seeking out obscure movies I read a lot of lists by fellow travelers, mostly through Amazon's defunct Listmania tool.  I'm not really sure why the site doesn't do that anymore, as it was a really convenient way to see what other people liked and see if it was for sale, and I made a few of them myself.  I also started a list of movies to see that would be constantly updated through the years, though when I started it I had a habit of putting tons of movies on the list without really absorbing what they were about and as a result.  One of those was Angst, an acutely obscure Austrian horror movie that I was extremely unlikely to see, as it dated from 1983 and had never been released on video in the US, and until very recently has nagged my mind as a missing link in my horror education.  This situation was remedied this past Saturday night when the great Grand Illusion Cinema screened the film, and as there's one more screening coming up this coming Saturday (June 20 at 9 pm) I feel the need to tell the world (of Seattle) about this unbelievable film in time for them to decide whether or not to see the film.  The screening is most likely in anticipation of the upcoming Blu-Ray and DVD release from Cult Epics, the company that did a great job resurrecting Death Bed: the Bed that Eats (yes, that's a real movie), this coming August 18th.  It will be a fully uncut and restored version of the film and the first time the movie will be available in the US in any form, and will most likely be seen as a high point in this year's home video lineup.  These options mean that it will be easier than ever before for people like you and me to see Angst, but don't say that I didn't warn you.

A young man (Erwin Leder) walks down a suburban street, comes up to a house, and shoots the old woman who answers the door, running away and into the hands of the authorities.  A psychologist narrator informs us of the man's long history of childhood disturbance, sadism and violent crimes, putting the man behind bars so much that nearly half of his life has been spent in jail.  Upon his release after the opening murder he goes to a local cafe and leers at two young women, then hails a cab driven by a different young woman.  He nearly strangles her with his shoelaces before she scares him out of her car and he runs terrified through the woods, not stopping until he reaches a stately but seemingly empty house.  He breaks in and finds that a mentally handicapped man in a wheelchair is in the house, and his sister and mother soon return from shopping.  Finally given a chance to act out his sadistic homicidal fantasies, the man throws himself at his new victims with unprecedented and horrifying results, and as he gets closer to realizing his sick dreams we realize he, and us, may never see things the same way again.

There have been many serial killer movies through the years, many of which are docudramas which reconstruct real killings in the hopes of answering some of life's toughest questions.  Most films of this type, such as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Monster, Dahmer and Next Time I'll Aim for the Heart, try to put the viewer in to the head of the killers in order so they may get closer to understanding their crimes and inner souls.  While Angst isn't set up much differently the effect is so intense and terrifying that it might actually be the scariest serial killer movie I've ever seen.  The effect might be difficult to explain without seeing it, so keep in mind that while I'll do my best to describe how the film works to you you'll need to see the movie to get the real experience.  

You know how movies have a "default" camera angle?  It's usually at eye level, with the camera set up between 5 and 10 feet away from the subject which is put in the middle of the frame.  Angst has none of those.  From the first shot we know Angst is going to go a singular route in depicting the killings, as its the first shot to use the SnorriCam, a device that attaches the camera to a rig attached to the body of the person it's filming.  While the technology dates back to John Frankenheimer's Seconds and earlier, the first movie I saw it used extensively in was Darren Aronofsky's Pi, wherein the camera was fixed as to point directly at actor Sean Guillete in a straight-on angle as he walked down the street, the frame pitching and bowing with every step he took.  Angst takes this tech one step further by allowing it to swivel around the actor as if on a 360-degree metal rail and guided by the cameraman.  These shots never let actor Erwin Leder escape our gaze, his paranoia made physical as the camera can't help but circle and hound him like a wounded animal.  Almost every other shot is some kind of angled tracking shot, either from above, below or jammed into awkward corners, and never in my life have I seen tracking shots so intense, sweeping and frightening.  Imagine if you took a security camera and mounted it on a crane that could reach fifty feet in the air, then rolled it around at the speed of a coked-up RC car, and you'l get a feel for how much of this film looks.  Every shot is voyeuristic and viscerally unsettling, blowing the interiors and exteriors wide open and creating seemingly impossible shots, such as where the camera swings upside down and across in a trick that would make Amelie jealous.  Other shots drag the camera right behind people crawling up staircases, falling over while taped to doors and being thrown out of wheelchairs, each shot tied to the action so well that the audience feels every movement in their bones.  This film was made soon after the invention of Steadicam, a piece of technology used extensively by Stanley Kubrick in The Shining to create smooth, versatile tracking movements in extended time spans, but not only did Angst not have access to this tech the lack of those cameras actually makes the action even more unsettling.  The mounted tracking shots, such as those above and below people, are seemingly done with the crappiest dollies the filmmakers could find, making sure that the camera picks up every rock, piece of dirt and crack in whatever ground it's traversing, and the shuddering frame perfectly mirrors the killer's unstable perception of the world.  It's an astonishing cinematographic achievement that should be studied in film schools the world over, and that's something I don't say lightly.

 

Angst's unique SnorriCam sequences

All of that would have been amazing on its own but what really completes Angst is the central performance by Erwin Leder (his character is never named), an actor I was previously unfamiliar with but now wish he was never in any other films simply so this performance could remain a perfect, isolated artistic statement.  This is the most unstable, balls-to-the-wall serial killer performance I've ever seen, topping even Charlize Theron's stunning performance as Aileen Wuorinos in Monster in sheer catastrophic abandon.  Leder's gaunt, lanky build and over-large eyes give him the look of a skeleton dipped in latex, and never before have I been so worried someone would simply fly apart from overaction in every scene.  Not even Baird Stafford in Nightmares in a Damaged Brain was this out of control of his own actions.  The filmmakers don't shy away from the the physical taxation the man puts on himself, not only in his killings but even his attempts to relax, such as eating and stopping for breath, and he is often drenched in sweat and deathly pale.  And dear God, does he throw himself around a lot, lunging into people, doors, windows and the air itself as if breaking down the door between himself and a loved one trapped inside a burning building.  The other great performance, almost as essential as Leder's, is that of a wiener dog owned by the family he attacks.  It follows him around for the whole second half of the movie, its presence a ticking time bomb as we already know his history with animal cruelty, and each second that passes with the dog in his presence is another twist of the thumbscrew.  And finally there's the droning, minimalist synthesizer score by German electronica God Klaus Schulze, at times slightly dated but nonetheless engulfing the film in a horripilative gauze that removes any possibility of exit for the viewer, forcing them to run alongside Leder's actions, never stopping but simply observing an awful truth.

I sometimes wonder why I love horror films so much, and specifically why I would want to watch a movie like Angst, one that seems transgressive every time it is described in words.  It certainly isn't the most violent, sadistic or disturbing film I've seen, but it is one of the most brutally scary films I've seen from any genre and era.  Who was the audience supposed to be for a movie like this, and what would that audience have been expecting?  Nobody could have anticipated this, and many viewers might have found themselves running out of the theater in terror or disgust.  The answer is that the film is for everyone, because its questions go the heart of how we define ourselves as human beings and members of society.  I talked before about how we use movies about the vilest people who ever lived as an extreme comparison to our own actions, and that peering into the darkest abyss of humanity is a necessity if society wants to achieve real results in its desire for self-improvement.  We have to know why people like Angst's young man do what they do even if an exact answer is impossible to attain.  Nobody is going to try to trick you into thinking a film like Schindler's List is any less disturbing than it actually is, because the act of watching the film is one way to understand one of the most horrifying episodes in human history. 

 This kind of cinematic experience had one of its most unusual and effective realizations in Alan Clarke's Elephant, one of the most potent calls for peace ever put to film.  A short film made for Northern Irish television, the film shows a series of killings committed without explanation or commentary, all done by anonymous gunmen with seemingly no motivation or allegiance.  Each murder begins by following the assassin in a long, walking tracking shot, showing the man shoot his victim, let him walk away, and then show the dead body in a static shot that lasts several seconds.  This happens 18 times with no music and almost no dialogue.  This oppressively repetitive presentation is a brilliant illustration of what the Troubles looked like to the rest of the world - a bunch of people who are totally indistinguishable from one another but murdered each other so regularly and with such poor motivation that any kind of political message was totally squandered in the face of a mounting pile of dead bodies.  Some critics felt watching the seemingly endless parade of senseless murders so unbearable that they wanted to yell "Stop!" at their TV screens, and that effect is precisely the point.  That kind of conflict simply cannot be allowed to continue, and we feel that need for peace in our gut.  We simply can't let serial killers exist, and the fact society keeps producing them and often fails to capture them is a deeply unsettling reality that we have no solution for.  Watching Angst I realized that all horror comes from things that are unacceptable to our understanding of reality, that impossibility, or desire for impossibility, exceeding mere fright.  In that sense all horror subjects can be put into two categories: things that can't exist (the supernatural) and things that shouldn't exist (human evil).  Angst is the most intense and direct attempt to ask the unanswerable questions of serial murder, the one thing that more than any other thing shouldn't exist, throwing the viewer into the unimaginable so forcefully and completely that nothing can let them escape.  There's one more chance for my Seattle area readers to see it on the big screen, so if you dare to take this suspense masterpiece head on the door is wide open.  I'll never come to regret taking the plunge but I can't guarantee you won't.  Watch at your own risk.

~PNK

A SIFF 2016 request - SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON (1964)

Last year I spotlighted nine films that I'd seen at the 2014 Seattle International Film Festival, and this year I'm going to publish another round-up article, hopefully reviewing many more films than my relatively paltry run last time.  This year I'm going to at least one of the special revival screenings featuring an older film rather than a new one, and SIFF always has a few of them each year - one year I saw the deeply unnerving Mother Joan of the Angels and left the theater shaking.  The revival I most want to see this year (and my schedule allows me to see) is The Color of Pomegranates, long on my TO WATCH list and most likely one for your list, too, and I'm really peeved I'm going to be missing Cave of the Spider Women.  While I've had some good luck in catching Midnight Movies and historical screenings at various silver screens (catching rarities like Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains and The Best Man utilizing original prints) I've recently been thinking of a list of older gems I'd love to see in a packed, darkened theater at SIFF or elsewhere, including a bunch of movies I've reviewed here.  Today I'd like to spotlight a film that not many people have seen but those who have hold it dearly to their hearts as a gem of 60's British filmmaking, Bryan Forbes's Seance on a Wet Afternoon.  Only fitfully available in the U.S., Seance has never been a huge moneymaker but its superb artistry and singularity in its genre make it a must-see for fans of psychological nail-biters, and I'd like to think of my article as my bid for its inclusion in SIFF's 2016 festival.

Myra (Kim Stanley) and Billy (Richard Attenborough) never really recovered from the death of their son Arthur.  Having been left to their own devices for far too long, Myra has unglued herself into the role of a professional medium and Billy laid down as her doormat long ago.  Myra hatches a plan - the two of them kidnap the young daughter of a wealthy couple and send a phony ransom letter.  Keeping the child in their son's old room masquerading as hospital staff treating her for "double German measles", Myra plans to step forward offering her services as a medium and eventually help the family and the police "find" the child.  As neither of the pair are professional criminals things can't exactly go as planned, and Myra's continued "communication" with Arthur may only be the least of their worries.

Botched kidnappings have long been a great plot device for crime thrillers, including After Dark, My Sweet, Fargo and Julia, but Seance tops them all in its exposure of the kind of loneliness and desperation that drives someone to take another family's child.  Largely eschewing the typical setpieces and pacing of its thriller genre, Seance uses silence and calm to crush the viewer's soul.  It's one of the slowest crime dramas I've ever seen yet it's never boring, the total stillness of Myra and Billy's insular existence so stifling at times to make the viewer want to claw their way out of their own skin.  There are rarely more than four or five people on screen at a time, the scenes mostly confined to drawing rooms and bedrooms, and when the action finds its way outdoors its surroundings are so entropied and forgotten some of them could double for a post-apocalyptic landscape.  Its through this acute emptiness and loneliness writer-director Bryan Forbes (working from a novel by Mark McShane) draws an indescribable and frightening atmosphere, playing off tight angles and stark confinement so well the viewer can feel the proximity of walls and taste the dust in the air.  I could feel the influence of Jack Clayton's The Innocents through much of the film, and why not take influence from one of the greatest horror films of the 60's to make a kidnapping film?  Both films illuminate how madness feeds off the echoes of the human mind left in the dark, as Myra's increasing instability and Billy's insurmountable weakness to her demands create a psychological moebius strip, each decision to dig their hole deeper dovetailing into the next.  The range of questions raised when someone decides to become a medium is a large and fruitful one for fiction, but Myra's need for her "gift" is both unsettling and enormously sad, and Billy's painful loyalty to her does little more than delay an inevitable point of psychological destruction.  The performances here are extraordinary and most likely career bests for both Stanley and Attenborough - Stanley teetered on a razor's edge so long the skin finally breaks, and Attenborough more regret than human.  The cinematography by Gerry Turpin (who would later photograph the heartbreaking senility portrait The Whisperers) is crisp and cold, accentuating each dry crack in living room walls and making sure neither the characters nor the viewer have any means of escape.  The music by John Barry (yes, the James Bond John Barry) has moments of shimmering, heartstopping simplicity and sensitivity, and the outdoor locations need little help to be engulfing.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon is hardly a thriller, and its insistence on forcing the viewer to live out the arc of its characters' madness in real time most likely contributed to its difficulty in finding an audience outside of England, even in spite of its mostly positive critical reception.  After briefly seeing the light of day on a VidAmerica VHS release in the 80's the film remained hidden until a 2002 DVD release by Home Vision Entertainment, the company behind the Criterion Collection that once had a DVD line under its own name that had a similarly high standard of its catalog without Criterion releases' high price tags and exhaustive print restoration.  The cover above is from that release, and I deviated from my usual practice of using original posters as headers for my reviews because I feel the HVE DVD cover is a better representation of the film's mood and atmosphere than any of the posters.  The release has its flaws, though - there's nary a special feature to be found and the sound transfer is poor, with people's voices creating ripping distortion at any dynamic above mezzo piano.  If I were a less jaded viewer I might be able to take the release's stifling sound transfer as another dimension to Myra and Billy's physical and mental prison but I've long outgrown the phase where I'd hold on to a fullscreen DVD of The Ring just because the movie is about video tapes.  I wonder why HVE didn't think the film wasn't good enough to be included in the Criterion Collection, as it's a hell of a lot better than a lot of movies they've featured (And the Ship Sails On, anyone?) and they later inducted The Innocents, anyways.  While we might not see a re-issue anytime soon some enterprising fans have made it easy for us and uploaded the film to YouTube, so until a revival comes your way you can at least see Seance for yourself in all its harrowing power.  It's a great reminder that sometimes prisoners are kept not so much so they can't get out but because their captors can't live without them inside.

~PNK