Foreign Film February: Re/Member (2022)

rememberposter

By now we all know the Groundhog Day Drill. Someone for some reason gets stuck in a time loop. The same day is played out for them over and over again. To stop it they must do something – make a life change, find a killer, stop a war, etc. whatever. There were time loop films before Groundhog Day, but that film perfected the concept and countless films have tried to repeat its success in various ways.

Re/Memory takes the basic concept and mixes it with a slasher horror film (something that has become something of a sub-sub-genre in itself) and a Japanese high school melodrama. Results are very mixed.

One of the many strange things the film does is that it kind of pushes many of the time loop elements to the side in order to focus on the relationship of its characters.

Set in a typical Japanese high school six students find themselves reliving the same day over and over. Eventually, they realize their task is to find the mutilated body parts of a young girl who was murdered many years ago. The ghost of the girl haunts them every day at midnight, stalking them until they are all dead, and the day resets.

But it only happens after midnight. The day begins in the morning and they each go about their regular day – attending school, having lunch, playing sports, etc. Then at midnight, they are transported to the chapel inside the school where they must find those body parts before getting killed. Apparently, the various arms and legs aren’t available during the day.

It is so strange to see them acting like normal high school kids with all of their romances and social clicks only to find them at night running for their lives. The film never deals with the fact that being murdered every night and watching your friends get killed would be incredibly traumatic for these kids.

These six kids are all lonely in one way or another. Our main protagonist, Asuka (Kanna Hashimoto) is considered a loner. No one at school talks to her and they act like she’s some sort of freak. Some of the others are outcasts as well, but some seem to be popular kids. They have friends, but deep down they are just as lonely.

Through battling a vengeful ghost every night they become a tight group of friends. It is like The Breakfast Club, but with a vengeful, murderous ghost. This is handled fairly poorly. For the first two days, all the other kids still shun Asuka, but suddenly on the third morning, they treat her like a bestie. And she’s suddenly no longer this super shy kid, but outgoing and friendly.

The horror aspects aren’t handled any better. The film tends to skip over the hunting for the body parts scenes. The kids do eventually learn to handle the hunt systematically, but there is very little actual searching for anything. In the same way, it skips over most of the real terror of the situation. There are maybe one or two moments where the kids are hiding from the monster, hoping to escape its clutches, but mostly the film focuses on the capture. There is plenty of violence and (poorly rendered) CGI gore.

I was more interested in the daytime scenes, but I’ve always been a sucker for high school movies. If you are looking for a horror take on the classic Ground Hog Day scenario there are many other better choices. I recommend Happy Death Day.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Noroi: The Curse (2005)

noroi the curse

For a very brief period in the early 2000s, Americans became obsessed with a certain type of Japanese horror (or J-Horror as it was known). We’d spent the 1980s watching slasher films, but by the 1990s those had grown stale. We didn’t seem to know what should take its place. So much so that in 1996 Wes Craven directed Scream which was essentially a self-aware slasher with hot TV stars.

Whereas American horror tended to be filled with horrendous violence and jump scares, Japanese horror at the time was more foreboding. The violence was toned down and in its place was psychological horror and a brooding atmosphere.

The Blair Witch Project introduced Americans to the found-footage genre in 1999. That movie, which is about some independent filmmakers making a documentary about a mythological witch that is supposed to haunt rural Maryland. They go missing and the film is supposedly made up of their leftover footage. It is a mix of their professionally made documentary footage and a lot of handheld camera work created by the actual actors living for a few weeks in the woods. It created a craze of found-footage horror.

Noroi: The Curse is a mixture of J-Horror and found footage films. It begins with a voiceover telling us about the life of Masafumi Kobayashi (Jin Muraki) who was a journalist investigating paranormal activity across Japan. Recently his house burned to the ground, killing his wife, but his body was not recovered and he is presumed missing.

He left behind a series of videotapes full of his research. The film presents those tapes along with a series of newsreels and television footage of various occult specials and the like. It all creates a sort of documentary approach to this fictional story.

At first, his investigative reports seem unrelated. There is a young girl with psychic abilities. An actress (Marika Matsumoto) sees something spooky in a graveyard and collapses. Another woman hears a baby crying next door, but the family’s children are all much older.

Slowly all of these various stories connect and point to a demon that was released from a village that is now buried under water after a dam was built. It seems to have possessed someone and is causing nearly everyone connected to the story to die under mysterious circumstances.

The violence is mostly off-screen and there is essentially zero gore. Tonally it is filled with an eeriness and the creepy soaks right through. I’m not a big fan of hand-held camerawork in movies as it tends to make me dizzy. There is some of that here, but mostly it’s used quite effectively. The camera is framed so that there are often strange little things in the background or on the edges of the screen. It makes you pay attention.

Like a lot of found footage films in which the characters seem to always be carrying a camera, there are times when I wanted to scream at them to put the camera down and run, or fight, or at least help that person getting pummelled by a demon. At least here our hero isn’t the one carrying the camera, he’s actually got a cameraman (working for his documentary) to do that for him.

The film uses the various footage in interesting ways. The way in which it moves between stuff shot by Kobayashi, and various television crews keeps the movie moving in a manner that other found footage films cannot keep up with.

I was a huge fan of J-horror during its initial craze, but I somehow missed this one. I’m glad I found it tonight as it is a good one.

The Movie Journal – January 2024

the furies

I watched 46 movies in January. 36 of them were new to me. 24 of them were made before I was born. 12 movies fit my theme of the month, Frozen In January.

As I mentioned in other posts I got Covid early in the month which pretty much killed that theme. From then on I mostly just watched whatever suited me at the moment, which mostly meant a lot of old movies, and quite a bit of comfort viewings.

One of the things I enjoy about starting the new year is that all of my stats reset. I get to start fresh. I get to think about the types of genres I want to watch, about the directors and stars I want to seek out. Later in the year, those things will start to solidify, but in January it’s all new. This month my top three genres were drama (25 films), thriller (20 films), and of course horror (14 films).

Clark Gable is my top star with an astonishing six films of his watched this month. That was almost by accident. I watched a couple of his films randomly early on and then caught a third. I liked that one quite a bit (A Man of Her Own) and then realized it was my third Gable film of the month and that I was really starting to like him as an actor (I’ve only seen 13 of his films in total so this month doubled my viewings) and decided to catch a few more.

Surprisingly the only director I watched more than one movie from was Umberto Lenzi, an Italian specializing in genre films – he helped Gang War in Milan and Nightmare City.

Overall it was a pretty good month. February is Foreign Film Month so look forward to me talking about subtitles.

He Walked by Night (1948) – ***1/2
Red Sparrow (2018) – ***1/2
Gang War in Milan (1973) – ***
China Seas (1935) – ***1/2
Mogambo (1953) – ***
Red Dust (1932) – ****
The Furies (1950) – ****1/2
Them! (1954) – ****
The Kiss of the Vampire (1963) – ****
Nightmare City (1980) – ***1/2
Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades (1972) – ***
No Man of Her Own (1932) – ***1/2
Man in the Shadow (1957) – ***1/2
Iron Man (1951) – ***
The Favourite (2018) – ****
Chicago Deadline (1949) – ***1/2
The Mystery of Marie Roget (1942) – ***
Intimidation (1960) – ****
Till Death (2021) – **
Run Silent, Run Deep (1958) – ****
I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948) – ***
Sleepwalkers (1992) – ***
Airport ’77 (1977) – ***
Somebody I Used to Know (2023) – *1/2
The Swimmer (1968) – ****
The Living Dead Girl (1982) – ***1/2
The Shining (1980) – ****1/2
Wind Chill (2007) – **
Night Nurse (1931) – ***1/2
Rancho Notorious (1952) – ***1/2
The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) – ****1/2
The Cat Creeps (1946) – ***
Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) – ****
The Lady Vanishes (2013) – ***1/2
The Martian (2015) – ****1/2
The Lodge (2019) – ***
The Thing (1982) – *****
Insomnia (2002) – ****
The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) – ***1/2
Phantoms (1998) – **
The Revenant (2015) – ****
A Bullet for Sandoval (1969) – ***
Death Hunt (1981) – *
Whiteout (2009) – *1/2
Jeremiah Johnson (1972) – ****
Miller’s Crossing (1990) – *****

Frozen In January – All the Movies

the revenant

For years and years now I’ve watched horror movies all through October. That’s not an original idea, thousands of people do the same thing as it’s fun to watch scary movies just before Halloween. Then a few years ago I discovered Noirvember and I’ve had a lot of fun with that. So much so that I continue to play with the idea of creating themes every month.

Sometimes they work really well. Last year’s Westerns in March and Awesome ’80s In April allowed me to watch and discover a bunch of interesting movies and I was able to write a few things about them. But I tried to do musicals one month and completely bombed at it, and last year I thought it would be fun to watch one movie I’d never seen from every year I’ve been alive. That was fun but it drifted off after about a decade’s worth of movies.

What I’ve realized is that when I pick a theme that is fairly broad in scope and full of the types of movies I already enjoy then I do fairly well with it, but when I get more specific my watching and writing tend to peter out pretty quick.

So when I pick a genre I like (westerns, horror films) I have no problem watching lots of those films within a given month because it’s the sort of thing I already watch a lot of. Or if I pick something really broad (like the entirety of the 1980s) then there is plenty of variety to choose from and I don’t get bored.

But when I get too specific (like musicals – a genre I enjoy but in small doses, or last month’s choice – films with isolated and cold settings) then my interest tends to wane before the month is over.

So it was with Frozen in January. I started out strong. I watched quite a few movies that fit the bill. I wrote about a couple but then Covid hit. My wife got it first. She was down and out for a week and I felt fine. Quarantine allowed me to watch quite a few of those films and I had all sorts of thoughts about what to write. Then I got it and it knocked me flat out. I spent a couple of days feeling really sick and another week feeling completely drained of all my energy. I watched comfort TV and forgot about writing anything.

It has been difficult getting back into the groove. Once I started feeling better my desire to watch frozen movies dissolved. My ability to write much of anything was gone.

However, I did want to say a few words about the movies I watched. I won’t write full reviews, but I did want to at least mention those movies as at least a nod towards this month’s theme.

Jeremiah Johnson (1972): Robert Redford plays a real-life mountain man who learns to survive all alone in an unforgiving environment. I wrote a full review here.

Whiteout (2009): Kate Beckinsale plays a US Marshall in Antarctica. Bad things happen. I knew this wasn’t going to be good, but the setup was interesting so I took the plunge. You can read my full thoughts here.

Death Hunt (1981): Charles Bronson plays a guy who moves to the Yukon for a little peace and quiet. He saves a dog and gets hunted for it. It is a dumb, dumb movie, the kind they could only make in the 1980s. You can read my full review here.

The Revenant (2015): Leonardo DiCaprio plays a frontiersman in the 1820s. He gets left for dead after being mauled by a bear and spends the rest of the movie getting pummelled by the elements, the natives, and everything else. But in the end, he finds his revenge. DiCaprio won the Oscar for it and Alejandro González Iñárritu fills it with some stunning direction.

Phantoms (1988): Based on a Dean Koontz book this film focuses on a group of strangers battling evil creatures in a snow-covered small town in Colorado. Despite a good cast (Ben Affleck, Peter O’Toole, Rose McGowan, Liev Schreiber) the film can’t overcome its silly, ridiculous origins.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015): Emma Roberts and Kiernan Shipka play two very different private school girls who spend an isolated, cold Christmas break on campus. A mysterious evil stalks them. This is of the modern school of “elevated horror” where the shots are meticulously crafted, the score is an eerie drone, but very little actually happens.

Insomnia (2002): Christopher Nolan’s remake of a Norwegian thriller stars Al Pacino as a cop with a dark past seeking a killer in the far north where the sun never stops shining. Robin Williams proves he was more than just a funny guy as the killer.

The Thing (1982): John Carpenter’s masterpiece is the perfect entry into my theme. I wrote a whole Friday Night Horror piece on it here.

‘Til Death (2021): Megan Fox stars as a woman who has a romantic evening with her husband at an isolated cabin in the snow-covered woods. She wakes up to find him dead and herself handcuffed to his corpse. That’s a fun premise but the movie makes stupid decision after stupid decision and completely ruins it. I wrote a rambly review over on Letterboxd.

The Lodge (2019): Man takes his two kids and fiancee (Riley Keough) into the woods to his isolated lodge. Then he goes back to the city to work (on Christmas for some reason). Strange things start happening driving her to the brink. The first act is chilly creepy and moody, then it all falls apart.

The Martian (2015): Oh, I had such a thing for this written up in my mind about how this movie fits with my theme. Then I got busy, or distracted, or something, and never put pen to paper. Matt Damon is an astronaut who gets accidentally stranded on Mars (an isolated setting, horrific terrain that can kill him in an instant – see it sort of fits my theme.) I love it. It has become one of my go-to movies when I’m feeling crappy.

The Shining (1980): Stanley Kubrick’s only foray into horror remains one of the all-time greats. I wrote a whole Friday Night Horror piece about it here.

Wind Chill (2007): Emily Blunt and Ashton Homes are two college students sharing a ride home for the holidays. They get stuck in the snow on some isolated back road and are haunted by ghosts. There are some cool ideas here, but ultimately it didn’t work for me.

That’s it. If you made it this far, thanks for reading.

The Conan Chronicles is the Blu-ray Pick of the Week

conan

What a fascinating career Arnold Schwarzenegger has had. He started out as a bodybuilder, becoming one of the greatest weightlifters ever known. He got bit parts in various movies and then had a starring role in the documentary Pumping Iron which put him in the national spotlight. Within a few years, he had become one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, despite not being a particularly good actor or English being his first language. Then he became Mayor of California. He could have retired then and rested on his laurels, but here he is, pushing 80 years old and still making movies.

But this isn’t about some new movie he’s made. No, this week’s pick is about two movies he starred in when he was first starting out. Those early roles relied heavily on his muscular physique. He might not be able to act, and he’s got a heavy accent, they seem to say, but oh boy is he ever big.

I was a little too young to have seen Conan the Barbarian when it came out in 1982, and though I looked at it often in the video store I only recently watched it. I gotta say for a silly sword and sorcery movie it’s actually pretty good. I still haven’t seen the sequel Conan the Destroyer, but I suspect this new set from Arrow Video is gonna change that.

Arrow Video consistently puts out terrific editions of less-than-stellar movies. They clean up the prints, load them with special features, put them in a nice box, and throw in a fully loaded booklet. The Conan Chronicles does all of that and more and that’s why it is my pick of the week.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

Trainspotting: Danny Boyle’s adaptation of the Irvine Welsh novel is a mesmerizing, flashy, thoroughly entertaining film. Not something you expect from a film about heroin addiction. It is one of the definitive films of the 1990s and now Criterion is giving it a definitive home video release.

Danza Macabra: Volume Two — The Italian Gothic Collection: As the title implies this collection from Severin Films includes four gothic thrillers from Italy (Castle of Blood, Jekyll, They Have Changed Their Face, and The Devil’s Lover). I’m not familiar with any of them, but I love Italian genre cinema.

Forgotten Gialli: Volume 6: If you’ve been a fan of my blog for very long then you’ll know I’m a big fan of the Italian horror subgenre known as Giallo. Vinegar Syndrome includes three obscure (and also very likely not very good) Giallit in this set (Death Carries a Cane, Naked You Die, and The Bloodstained Shadow). Good or not color me interested.

Mudbound: Another Criterion release. This one is about two men returning home to rural Mississippi after serving in World War II where they deal with rampant racism and struggle to adjust to civilian life.

The Abbott and Costello Show: Season 2: I guess I was a weird kid growing up because I love Abbott and Costello. I used to argue with my friends that they were better than The Three Stooges and my friends loved The Stooges. I imagine I’ve seen skits from the show, but I don’t know that I ever sat down and watched an episode. This should be fun.

Thanksgiving: A horror-themed Thanksgiving movie. How did it take them this long to think of that?

Joe’s Apartment: The old joke is that no one can remember when MTV actually played music videos. They did, I can attest, I remember those days. But they always had other content as well. At some point during my youth, they ran a short film called Joe’s Apartment about a guy who lived with a bunch of bugs who could talk and sing and acted like little, grubby humans. It was delightful. It was popular enough that they made a full-length feature film out of it which promptly bombed at the box office and was hated by everyone.

Run Silent, Run Deep (1958)

run silent run deep

I love me a good submarine movie and this is the film that essentially created all of the usual tropes of the genre. It isn’t the best that was ever made, but it isn’t far from it either. Anytime you’ve got Burt Lancaster and Clark Gable in a picture you know you’re gonna get something interesting. Anyway, here’s my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

Chantal Akerman Masterpieces 1968–1978 Is the New Blu-ray Pick of the Week

chantal akerman

I’m a little late with this. I wrote it for Cinema Sentries on time, but they were having a little trouble with their hosting service and so it just now got posted over there.

Chantal Akerman was a Belgian director whose films have been highly praised and that I’ve never seen. This new Criterion set looks like a good place to start. You can read all about that and some other interesting Blu-rays out this week by clicking here.

Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XVI

dark side of cinema

Kino Lorber, the boutique Blu-ray label has been releasing these sets of three relatively obscure film noirs for a few years now. I’ve reviewed quite a few of them, and while not every film is a classic, or even that good, I always enjoy watching them.

You can read my full review of this set over at Cinema Sentries.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Nightmare City (1980)

nightmare city

George A. Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead didn’t exactly invent the zombie movie, but it perfected it and popularized most of the genre’s tropes. Ten years later he made a sequel, Dawn of the Dead. That film was a huge success in Italy, so successful that in 1979 Lucio Fulci made an unofficial sequel entitled Zombi 2 (Dawn of the Dead was renamed Zombi in Italy). It was a big hit and the Italian zombie crazy had begun.

Lots and lots of Italian zombie films were made over the next several years. Some of them are great, some of them are terrible, but they are almost all worth watching. The Italians tended to go big – bigger violence and gore, more nudity and sex. What they miss in nuance and social commentary they more than make up for in over-the-top craziness.

They also allowed themselves to get a little weird, to play with the genre in interesting ways. In Nightmare City the zombies are not the slow-walking, brainless ghouls from Romero’s films, but rather somewhat intelligent, fast-moving monsters capable of using weapons and systematically invading places like hospitals and power stations.

It begins with an airplane flying towards some unnamed European airport. The tower gets no response when it asks the plane to identify itself. When it lands the police surround it, demanding whoever is inside come out with their hands up. When the door does open what comes out is a mass of knife-wielding maniacs whose faces are covered in scabs and scars (more like oatmeal and latex if you ask me). Guns seem to do nothing to these monsters; in an instant, they have killed everyone on sight.

Well, nearly everyone. Our hero, a news reporter named Dean Miller (Hugo Stiglitz) was there to interview a nuclear scientist, manages to escape.

What follows, plot-wise is your fairly typical city under siege storyline. The government orders everyone to stay in their homes and lock their doors. The military comes out in force to kill the zombies. Scientists scramble to figure out just exactly what’s going on (it was radiation, stupid).

Our hero rushes to the hospital to rescue his doctor’s wife and then they try to escape the city.

The script is a mess. There is a lot of speechifying about how mankind is a doomed species and how we’ve used technology to play god, etc. and so forth. It is nothing you haven’t heard in a million other science fiction films, and none of it is delivered confidently. The military and other law enforcement presence seems very small. You’d think they’d bring in tanks and jet planes to secure the area, but we see almost none of that. Presumably, the budget wasn’t big enough to bring in actual military vehicles (the best we get is a helicopter).

The violence is a funny mix of really bad to surprisingly gruesome. There are a lot of zombies with knives and hatches but their stabbing and slicing is often completely bloodless. Sometimes they don’t even break the skin though it seems to drop their victims stone dead. But in other scenes, we’ll see a guy get his eyeball ripped out with a stick, or a woman has her breast completely cut off.

There are a lot of naked breasts in this film. The men tend to get stabbed in the neck, but the women seem to almost always have their shirts ripped off and their boobs stabbed.

It is nothing new to have low-budget horror films throw a lot of gratuitous nudity at their viewers, but it happens so often here that it is both hilarious and tedious (and of course wildly sexist).

Despite all of this, I really rather enjoyed myself. You can’t go into a film like this expecting greatness. But director Umberto Lenzi keeps things moving at a steady pace and he has enough skill to not make the ridiculousness too inept. It all comes off as seriously ridiculous fun.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Till Death (2021)

till death

Last week in my Friday Night Horror column I noted that I’d not done a lot of writing for my Frozen in January theme of the month, but that I hoped I’d get back in the groove soon. Obviously, that didn’t happen. I’ve watched quite a few films that fit the theme, but I just haven’t felt the desire to do much writing. I actually started writing a thing on The Martian (a man stranded on the desolate, frozen planet of Mars fits the bill I think – or at least I was gonna try and make it fit) but then a couple of paragraphs in and I couldn’t find the energy.

That happens sometimes. To everyone I suppose. I just get in a funk and wonder what the heck I’m even doing. Once again I’ll hope that writing this column will get me back in the groove.

Till Death stars Megan Fox as Emma Davenport, a woman who at the beginning of the film is ending the affair she’s been having with Tom (Aml Ameen). It isn’t right, she says. She needs to go back to her husband Mark (Eoin Macken).

God knows why. As we’ll soon realize Mark is a terrible person. It is their anniversary and she meets him at a swanky restaurant. The first words out of his mouth are to complain she isn’t wearing the red dress he likes. She’s wearing a nice little black dress and she’s Megan Fox so she looks good. But it isn’t the dress he was expecting so after the meal he drives her home and forces her to put on the red one.

He’s the kind of guy who orders her dessert even though she says she’s full. He bought her a weird steel necklace for their anniversary and immediately puts it on her, but then frowns at the tickets she bought him to the Super Bowl.

He makes her wear a blindfold while he drives her out to the secluded cabin he owns in the woods. He forces her to keep it on the entire way even though it is at least an hour’s drive and she’s complaining it is making her car sick.

There are twenty minutes of this stuff. Of him being a jerk to her while she sits in sad silence. Twenty agonizing minutes just waiting for her to wake up handcuffed to his corpse.

That’s not really a spoiler because it is in all the promotional material, and any blurb you read about the film is gonna tell you that information. That’s the reason I watched the film. But I nearly turned it off before it got there, the film was so dumb.

So he takes her to this cabin. Makes her sit in the kitchen blindfolded (again) while he lays a bunch of rose petals down and lights a billion candles. Then she wanders around the house looking for him – she puts on the record he leaves a note telling her to play – and then when she finally finds him (in the bedroom of course) his words aren’t something sweet and romantic but a complaint that it took her too long to find him.

He then finally says something nice and they have sex. The next morning she wakes up to find herself handcuffed to him but before she can even really ask him why, he blows his brains out.

The rest of the film involves her trying to get the heck out of there. But the thing is, he’s drained the car of gasoline, broken her phone, and removed any sharp object that might allow herself to get free of him. Eventually, some other folks show up and things get even more difficult for her.

That part – woman handcuffed to a dead man in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of winter, with no means of escape – should be really good. But the character and the film make so many stupid decisions I just wanted it to be over way before the credits actually rolled.

To wit: after he kills himself, blowing blood and guts all over her face, she doesn’t scream or freak out. She doesn’t check for signs of life. She almost immediately drags his body over to the phone to call for help. When she finds it dead, she grabs the gun and tries to blow the handcuff chain to bits. She doesn’t check for a key in his pockets or anything. It takes her half an hour to clean the blood off her face.

She puts his shirt and pants on (for all she brought was that little red dress and apparently some skimpy pajamas, but not an actual over night bag for some reason) but not his socks and shoes even though she’ll spend lots of time wandering around outside in the snow.

Over and over she (and eventually the other characters) make the stupidest decisions ever. The film does dumb things too. Like skipping over important or interesting things. I mean how does she get his shirt off of him and on to her when they are handcuffed together. That’s the kind of thing we need to see!

Periodically Emma will make some kind of smart-ass comment. After dragging his corpse around the house looking for something that might help out she remarks that she was dragging his dead body around for years, long before he killed himself. Ha! and so forth. But there isn’t enough of that kind of thing to make her interesting.

I’m not a big fan of Megan Fox and while she isn’t bad here, she doesnt’ have the charm this kind of role calls for. The direction is fine, it keeps things fairly taut and moving. There are moments that are more or less thrilling, but all of the ridiculous stuff happening kept me shaking my head in annoyance.