FEATURING: Srdjan Todorovic, Sergej Trifunovic, Jelena Gavrilovic, Katarina Zutic, Slobodan Bestic

PLOT: An ethical and well-intentioned ex porn star collaborates with an Eastern syndicate to
produce a series of art-house pornographic films. In the process he is unwittingly ensnared in the dark, serpentine morass of his film executives’ depraved madness.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Despite the colorful controversy surrounding A Serbian Film, including claims that it is torture porn and even child porn, the movie is a straightforward—if transgressive—cross-genre thriller, a skillfully blended mix of mystery, horror and suspense elements.  Adventurous viewers who choose to watch A Serbian Film should seek the uncut version.  The controversial scenes are a crucial part of the plot.

NOTE: Director Srdjan Spasojevic was confronted by the international press and informed that his movie A Serbian Film is nothing more than thinly veiled torture porn, perhaps even child pornography.  He responded by asserting that the movie is in fact “a political allegory,” intentionally resplendent with metaphors for the historical, systematic repression of the Serbian people. For example, Spasojevic tells explains that the shocking baby scene “represents us and everyone else whose innocence and youth have been stolen by those governing our lives for purposes unknown.”

Is he being serious?  Or does he believe the most effective way to point out the absurdity of detractors’ allegations and deliberate misinterpretations is to posit an equally absurd response?  A thorough consideration of this controversy is beyond the scope of this review.  The viewer should watch the movie and judge for himself.  I present my own ideas regarding what I think the film discursively accomplishes in the addendum which follows the review.  Whether Spasojevic intends the film to deliver any of these meanings is a matter of speculation.  Despite what I think are some very good points made in the film, it’s my personal belief that he primarily set out to make an offbeat, tense thriller that was shocking enough to be sure to attract attention.  He succeeded.

COMMENTS: Lurid and grim, suspenseful and exciting, A Serbian Film is a well crafted, taut thriller that doesn’t insult one’s intelligence.  Sporting a chic visual signature and structured with a non-linear, temporally shifting plot, this sensational shocker fires off images that range from bizarre and salacious to astounding and stupefying.  By applying the element of satire, A Serbian Film impels its audience to appraise the controversial predicament of contemporary mass-produced culture.  The result is provocative, visceral and shocking.

Milos (Todorovic) is an easy-going family man who used to be a successful pornographic movie actor. Needing additional income, he grudgingly accepts a mysterious offer from an enigmatic production company to star in their flagship project, a series of “high art” experimental adult films. What Milos doesn’t know, however, is that the producer, a government agent named Vukmir (Trifunovic) with obvious Russian Mafia affiliations, is quite completely insane.  Without Milos’s consent, he doses the unsuspecting actor with a futuristic cattle stimulant.

Poor Milos has no idea what is in store. The real details of the scripts are kept secret from him. Production is arranged like a sort of reality show. Multiple cinematographers with digital cameras lead and follow him in real time as directions are fed to him through a small earpiece.

The films turn out to be an avant-garde exercise in taboo extremism. Appalled by requests to violently degrade women and seduce minors, Milos finally grasps the full extent of the producer’s intentions. Deeply disturbed by the crew’s pernicious agenda, Milos possesses a progressive, but genuine moral compass. His conscience compels him to resist. Yet even the actors he works with possess a malignant bent. Behaving like miscreants some of them seem to actually enjoy being degraded.

A classic good and evil struggle ensues between Milos and Vukmir. Vukmir praises Milo’s “talent,” but wants to ferociously exploit him, to use him up, drain him dry, steal his soul and discard him like a paper cup. He schemes to eventually dispatch Milos with an end fitting for an exhausted stag goat. Milos flees, only to be recaptured, sedated, and forced to participate.

Now at the mercy of the sinister syndicate, a sexy, diabolical biochemist keeps Milos subdued with cocktails of powerful, mind-altering narcotics. When the armed crew of jack-booted production technicians is ready to film, she injects her brainchild livestock aphrodisiac into Milos with reckless abandon. In large amounts the potion turns a subject into a bellicose, crazed rapist, easily incited to violence. The producers don’t just want a sexual performance from Milos. They want brute-force physical aggression, and the formula renders even the most abject perversion irresistible to him.

The bovine sex stimulant compels Milos to confront the most grim, primal dimensions of biological programming run amok. He finds himself helplessly driven to desperately gratify himself by committing horrifying, depraved atrocities of sexual barbarism. Plunged into a bedlam of psychotic excess, Milos is trapped on the other side of the looking glass. There is no salvation for him. The filmmakers have powerful government and organized crime associations. They’ve thought of everything and covered every angle. Milos must find a way to deliver himself, but how? Subjected to violence and sexual assaults alongside the films’ other subjects, will Milos manage to achieve deliverance before he is ravaged of his last vestiges of humanity?

As Milos plunges into a nightmare of lust and death, some of the sex acts that A Serbian Film depicts are appalling. They are supposed to be sickly pornographic in the fictitious concept of a film within a film. The images are not, however, prurient from the audience’s perspective. Presented through Milos’s point of view as an unwilling participant, copulation is filmed in such a way as to reveal little explicit nudity other than some quick shots of heaving breasts. Rather, the frames are composed in a manner that tricks the audience’s sense of perception. This is a cornerstone of theater and magic; people see what they think they are being shown, or what they want to see.

A Serbian Film contains violence that is controversial because it is sexually related, but the piece brandishes less mayhem than many action movies, and remember, it is a work of horror. Moreover, unlike many action and splatter films, the violence is not a gratuitous exhibition. It furthers the plot and the terror.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 ”In its histrionic dream logic, the movie says as much about Eastern Europe as Twilight does about the Pacific Northwest. Frankly, you’d be better off self-abusing.”–Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York (contemporaneous)

A Serbian Film – sanitized trailer

—————————————————

ADDENDUM:

A Serbian Film Is Socially Apposite and Cinematically Significant

It is tempting to deliberately misconstrue A Serbian Film, but it would be a miscalculation to dismiss this effort for being symptomatic of the controversy that it addresses. Granted, the filmmakers’ primary objective was to create a provocative thriller, an effort at which they impressively succeeded. The film is unique however, not only in its portrayal of a porn star as a sympathetically conscionable character, but in it’s exposition of audience malleability.

Notably, the picture conveys a grim social observation about the runaway train effect of ever-increasingly deviant pornography. This idea doesn’t break new ground. It’s not one that hasn’t been considered independently of A Serbian Film. What makes A Serbian Film so cogent is that it adds a chilling dimension to the contention. When an increasingly fiendish and jaded audience demands snuff movies, who will answer the casting call?

A Serbian Film builds credibility to set the stage for its postulation not just by being shocking, but by employing exaggeration. The movie operates on a dual plain of horror and subtle, dark satire. Some of the imagery illuminates realities so abhorrent that the element of mockery may not be immediately evident. Satire is detectable however, when sensational elements in the film are very slightly over-the-top, without being contrived.

Three concepts are played on: the misguided idea of justifying porn as art, pornographic contrivances in general, and outright perversion. In accordance with the first, Vukmir aggrandizes himself as being a break-through auteur and pornography prophet. For him, this new brand of pioneering smut is nothing short of visionary. Like Theatre of Cruelty French playwright Antonin Artaud, Vukmir conceptualizes the organic essence of theater as consisting of the coarse elements of naked emotion. Plot, storyline, and method are secondary to a surreal atmosphere conveyed with minimalist, but dreamlike sets, and a nearly psychedelic parade of alarming visual sensationalism.

To Vukmir, the highest form of drama, the best-selling subject matter, and thus the best pornography is based on the most striking reality: the reality of horror and victimization. “The victim feels the most and suffers the best,” he proclaims to Milos. Vukmir takes Cinema of Transgression to a philosophical plain. What appears on the screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, taboo and violent pornography is reality, and reality is less than taboo and violent pornography.

Perhaps not as dramatically, real-life pornographers have clung to similar, albeit watered-down versions of these grand sorts of delusions, believing that they employ genuine craftsmanship to produce solid works of art. This has been depicted in the popular media. Examples are found in parodies of the adult film industry, such as the biographical Rated X about the notorious Mitchell brothers, and in the reality-inspired black comedy, Boogie Nights.

In addressing the notion that pornography (as opposed to explicit erotica) can be a valid medium of expression, A Serbian Film‘s aphotic send up of smut strikes some common ground with David Cronenberg‘s Videodrome. In the latter, producer Max Renn discovers a secret, pornographic BDSM torture program. It consists of a nude woman being strapped to a wrought iron grate in front of a clay wall, and savagely whipped, presumably, eventually to death by leather-hooded executioners.

Harlen, Renn’s media technician, observes that the torture show is “for perverts only.” Unable to discern any significant difference between the poetically substantial and the superficially sensational, Max fires back, “Absolutely brilliant. I mean look, there’s almost no production costs. You can’t take your eyes off it. It’s incredibly realistic. Where do they get actors who can do this?”

It’s a revealing and sardonically humorous reply, in that Max completely misses the point. The dreadful truth is that those are not actors at all, but genuine victims. Similarly, in A Serbian Film, Vukmir tries to enlighten Milos by demonstrating the cutting edge of profound drama and ready marketability, concepts which are interchangeable to him. During the screening of a film in which a brutish, incognito man delivers a baby and then rapes it, a shocked Milos runs out of the room in disgust. Vukmir roars after him that he has just seen high art, but can’t accept it. “Can it be that you don’t get it? This is a new genre, Milos! The new porn is newborn porn!” He triumphantly shouts.

A Serbian Film wryly, sublimely lampoons pornographic clichés. It not only demonstrates the artificiality of commercial pornography, but also stresses it’s superficiality. For instance, in the above scene to which Milo was just subjected, the mother revels in the rape, ecstatically savoring the penetration of her offspring as if she herself were the sexual vessel. This is an exaggeration of the phenomenon of transferred gratification, a form of male ego-stroking for the sake of audience patronization. A staple of adult films, the most common example occurs when an actress expresses as much pleasure and enjoyment in her partner’s exhibitionistic ejaculation as she would derive from her own climax. A Serbian Film satirizes the absurdity of this canon by taking it to the extreme with the new mother’s ecstasy.

Other grist for A Serbian Film‘s burlesque of triple-x entertainment include the male fantasy of the completely and enthusiastically submissive female. A throbbing Venus-like icon of instant sexual gratification, she worships at the altar of the turgid male sexual organ, and revels in abundant facefuls and mouthfuls of scalding, sanctimoniously-sprayed semen. It is an additional tenet of the pornographic representation of reality that women are merely licentious tureens. They are not to be gently made love to, but rather vigorously assaulted, and it is this axiom that the film enlarges upon so effectively. In Vukmir’s production, the assault evolves from the exaggerated, rough, comically frantic sex of garden variety porn, and explodes into a fury of genuine violence.

This leads to the central tent of A Serbian Film, which is its statement about pornography’s deleterious effect upon contemporary culture by way of the slippery slope. In the story, victim porn is the ultimate, “priciest sell.” In the movie’s setting, this is what the social climate has degenerated to.

Traditionally, many forms of perverse and deviant behavior are condemned or restricted. Society pressures its citizens to deny or suppress facets of the human condition, e.g. inappropriate primal instincts. Due to social controls, relatively few people will ever have to confront the disconcerting fact that under the right set of circumstances, they are capable of just about anything.

Pulling out the stops can produce a cumulative, or domino effect. Like domesticated pets becoming feral without human supervision, a dramatic example can be found in the curious case of the 16th Century Scottish Sawney Beane clan. Having isolated themselves from society, the Beanes became inbred and mad, turning into genetic mutants, living off highway robbery and pickling and eating their victims.

The idea of a cumulative effect applies as well to viewers becoming jaded by progressively far-fetched prurience. As the Randy Marsh character laments about his addiction to Internet porn in the irreverent animated comedy South Park, “I need the Internet to jack off. I got used to being able to see anything at the click of a button, you know? Once you jack off to Japanese girls puking in each other’s mouths you can’t exactly go back to Playboy!”

Given that so much commercial porn seems to cater to the gross-out factor at the very bottom of the medulla oblongata’s intellectual barrel, it’s understandable that Randy has become hardened, so to speak. Indeed, if the bizarre, runaway nature of society’s perversions as reflected in everything from crush erotica and felching, to plushophilia and the sexual aspects of furry fandom is any indicator of what can happen when people are allowed to freely indulge unfettered in their kinky twists, then A Serbian Film posits a provocative proposition. If there is no mechanism in place to limit widespread, commercial indulgence in perversion, will sexual deviance compound on itself until the demand for crush videos and Japanese girls puking gives way to cravings for snuff movies and baby rape?

Can we take a cue from history? There is nothing new about barbarous savagery and violent sexual perversion. They have been around for a long time. For instance, during looting and pillaging of those they conquered, Attila’s Huns would engage in a form of monstrous gang-bang in which numerous soldiers would dismount from their horses and fall upon a single woman. The first three men occupied her primary orifices, the additional rapists would cut their own in her body cavity.^[1]

In ancient Rome, bestiarii trained all nature of wild beasts, from horses to lions to giraffes, to rape immobilized girls for a leering public. Author Daniel P. Mannix describes a scene in which a prostitute and her pimp were tricked into performing an exhibition of lovemaking positions in the arena, and just when the crowd was growing bored of watching, a wild bear was released to rip the couple apart and devour them mid-coitus. This delighted the audience who considered the stunt to be a very good joke.^[2]

Historians attribute the origins of the eventual Roman Colosseum spectacle to a boxing style, gladiatorial match staged between three pairs of slaves in 246 BC. Arranged by Marcus and Decimus Junius Brutus Scaeva to honor the memory of their deceased father, the event drew a large crowd to the Forum Boarium in Rome. One thing led to another and centuries later, the Roman mob was showing up regularly at the Colosseum to behold an astounding width and breadth of atrocities.

This is an oversimplification of course. The factors giving rise to the nature of the games in the Colosseum are varied and complex. It is nevertheless illustrative of the notion of the runaway train phenomenon that occurs when an audience is cultivated around, and continually bolstered with aberrant debauchery and violence.

Obviously perversion unraveling to its extremes is nothing new, but its mass production and global distribution are relatively recent developments. Avenues of modern exposition now include Internet sites that deliver video satiation at the touch of a button. One can “jack off,” as Randy Marsh so elegantly phrased it, to anything from coprophelia and foot fetishes to bestiality and child pornography.

This form of electronic dispensation makes paper and ink publishing of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days Of Sodom seem as antiquated as waiting for a town crier to shout breaking news. It is this high tech and widespread commercial marketing of outrageous deviance that A Serbian Film addresses. The movie impels a consideration of the domino effect of an increasing demand for perversion in concert with unprecedented, broad dissemination. It does so with a striking and engaging bearing that abstains from being preachy.

This makes A Serbian Film as thought-provoking as it is horrifying. That’s important because perhaps we should consider the consequences of a commercial brutality industry. Going back to the Max Renn Videodrome quote above, if the runaway train of cultural degradation should in fact, give way to another era of Colosseum-style cruelty, “where will we find the actors who can do this?”

1. G.L. Simons, Simon’s Book Of World Sexual Records (Random House:1982)
2. Daniel P. Mannix, Those About To Die (Ballantine: 1974)

DIRECTED BY:  Lucifer Valentine

FEATURING:  Ameara Lavey, Pig Lizzy, Maja Lee

PLOT: A bulimic teen makes a pact with the devil in this nonsensical odyssey of ICK!

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Despite it’s feature length and small cult following, Slaughtered Vomit Dolls is not really a movie at all,  just a collage of clips.  It was not structured to make any sort of sense, nor does it seem intended to be taken seriously.  Regrettably, there does not appear to have been enough thought behind it to consider that it might be a joke on the audience, as was the case with Andy Warhol‘s notorious Sleep (1963).  Of course, I wanted to write about it as a joke.  I was going to begin with an intro stating something to the effect that I always try to recommend good cinema.  But conscience won’t let me play that joke on you.  The movie is really that bad.

COMMENTS:   Abused teen Angela flees home, is sheltered by a lecherous priest, and sexually exploited by all she meets.  Think Candy (1968), by Christian Marquand and Buck Henry, based on Terry (Dr. Strangelove) Southern’s novelized parody of Voltaire’s Candide.  Only with mangled vignettes, jump cuts, smash cuts, blood, simulated violence, gore, heaving breasts, full frontal nudity, incoherent babbling, dancing bears, Nazism, and of course vomit.  Lots of it.  Minus the clever plot of Candy. OK, just kidding about the dancing bears and Nazism, but suffice it to say, Slaughtered Vomit Dolls makes Doors lead singer Jim Morrison’s UCLA film studies student project look like Citizen Kane.

Anyway, back to the “plot” (or lack of it).  Drug addicted, alcoholic, and repeatedly used as a sexual bucket, a fed-up Angela refutes all worldly good and makes a pact with Satan in return for His protection.  It doesn’t work out well.  After setting fire to the priest’s church, Angela descends into stripping and prostitution, spiraling ever more furiously hell-bound, with lots of blood, gore, heaving breasts, full frontal nudity, vomit of course, and—oh wait, we already covered that.

Yup.  That’s about it.  Eye gouge scenes, raving girls rolling on the floor in religious mania, and naked strippers whom Valentine recruited from the local roadhouse.  Hot, deranged, tormented, supple, quivering naked strippers covered with red corn syrup, sticking their fingers down their throats and retching on a glass table positioned over an upturned camera.

Apparently Lucifer Valentine is a film student with access to cameras, lights, makeup, and little in the way of clever ideas.  He set out to make the ultimate work of shock value pop “art.”  As pop “art,” it does indeed reflect abstract expressionism via a survey of superficial contemporary counter-cultural values: sex, drugs, rock and roll, violence, and nihilism.  But so does a drive though Southeast LA.  Valentine certainly succeeded in making the most deliberately offensive, ridiculous, non-nonsensical picture he could.

Only my most proudly deviant weirdo friends will want to see Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, the first entry in Valentine’s Vomit Gore Trilogy.  (Yes, that’s right, there are three of these movies.  The next two entries are the 2009 ReGOREgitated Sacrifice, and Slow Torture Puke Chamber [2010]).  Yow!

All others avoid at all costs.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…everything on display here (including its at times ‘film-school-esque’ execution) seems all to deliberate. How can we shock? How can we be disgusting? How can we seem weird? How can we gain attention? When your viewer feels as if you were asking these questions during the ‘creative’ process, much of its potential integrity and/or effectiveness is lost.”–Lawrence P. Raffel, Monsters at Play (DVD)

Scenes from Slaughtered Vomit Dolls

FEATURING:  Elisha Cuthbert, Camilla Belle, Edie Falco, Martin Donovan, Katy Mixon

PLOT: A deaf girl becomes ensnared in her adoptive family’s amoral dysfunctions.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:   The Quiet is an artfully produced, comparatively non-formulaic independent film, but it’s not a dramatic enough departure from the thriller genre to constitute a truly weird viewing experience.

COMMENTS:  Strong sexual themes ground this strange tale of a family slowly going insane.  After her father’s untimely death, deaf-mute teenager Dot (Belle) is taken in by her godparents (Donovan, Falco) who from outward appearances have a conventional, affluently idyllic suburban life along with their cheerleader daughter Nina (Cuthbert).  Dot’s transition is derailed by increasingly disturbing conflicts and revelations. Her new family has dark secrets.

A sick, twisted dysfunctionality plagues the household.  Trapped between an opiate addict mother, licentious father, homicidal sister, and perverted new beau, Dot struggles to keep her perspective.  Unable to readily communicate, and with no outside party to turn to, Dot is at a disadvantage when her demented new family draws her into a sordid web of immorality and charade.  The line between spider and fly becomes blurred, however, when it turns out that Dot harbors her own eerie enigma.

The Quiet rips the facade from blissful, suburban tranquility in the tradition of movies such as American Beauty and The Safety Of Objects.  Less satirical than the former and not as convoluted as the later, The Quiet is a suspenseful drama with an hypnotic narrative tone reminiscent of One Day Like Rain and Make-Out with Violence.

The Quiet is a well produced film with a perverse story.  It does not set out to be a black comedy, or a sophisticated social indictment of suburbia, although it contains some elements of both.  Neither is it a movie with a message or mere exploitation.  The Quiet is a simple, racy, psychological thriller.  With some hauntingly memorable dialogue, it is arty yet lucid, brooding and visually dark.  While more twists and turns would have provided greater depth, it is structurally complete enough to be worthwhile for patrons seeking a departure from blockbusters, crowd-pleasers, and annoying Lifetime Network potboilers.

Feminist director Jamie Babbit’s other films include But I’m A Cheerleader and Itty Bitty Titty Comittee.  Viewers will recognize Cuthbert from the sensational The Girl Next Door.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…flirts with the trappings of exploitation cinema without going all the way. The director… suggestively crowds her two talented leads together, but can’t push them or the film into the fairy-tale surrealism to which she seems to aspire.”–Manohla Dargis, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

The Quiet trailer

FEATURING: Nick Stahl, Rose McGowan, Amy Smart

PLOT: Haunted by the memory of a car crash, a lonely funeral assistant fakes his own

death. Tracking a mystery mourner, he finds himself tangled in intrigue while suffering from bizarre, piecemeal flashbacks from his discordant, seemingly supernaturally influenced past.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  While Dead Awake captures our imagination at first with ominous flashbacks and peculiar visions which emphasize details in a way that foreshadow profound significance, none of these clues pan out to reveal an extraordinary plot.  The method of revelation builds interest in previous events that turn out to be not very mysterious once we are let in on their meaning.  Worse, at about the halfway point, the story becomes a derivative, conventional chiller.

COMMENTS:  The setup:  Nick Stahl plays sullen, skulking  funeral director who stages his own death to see if old friends will arrive at his funeral.  When an enigmatic young woman comes to mutter cryptic utterances over his “corpse,” he follows her and has some unusual misadventures.  In the meantime, he flirts with an ex-girlfriend who also came to his viewing, unlocking a cascade of strange memories and guilt about some mysterious, previous tragedy that broke them apart.  Eventually, we find out how both women are connected to  Nick’s past and to his haunting recollections.

Sounds like the makings of a real whiz-bang chiller-thriller, right?  Wrong!  What a massive disappointment. I was expecting something clever, brooding and supernatural like Dark Corners, and that’s how Dead Awake starts out. There is a mysterious car crash, a mortuary attendant faking his own funeral, a mysterious griever talking in riddles, indications that half the characters may be dead and not know it, and eerie flashbacks wrought with hidden symbolic meaning.

The non-linear plot, dark tone and twists and turns made me think I was in for a real doozy of a story.  And then the film peters out.  The flashbacks reveal no great mystery, the symbolism turns out to be arbitrary and empty, and real ideas are replaced with melodrama, over-acting and a grandiose musical score that is more fitting of a sweeping historical epic.  The score seems calculated to try to fool the viewer into thinking he is watching something more important than he really is (it didn’t work).

The movie wraps up with an unlikely stretch of a “climax” (more of an anti-climax) and a corny, happy (more like sappy) ending with a lame and very mild twist that opens up a bunch of plot holes.

I paid money for this???  I swear, no more poppy juice and Colt .45 before I read DVD jackets at the video store.

I saw that Nick Stahl was in this and so far, I have seen him in three other movies that turned out to be artistic, independent, and pretty good, so I took a gamble.  Mind you, Dead Awake is not a bad movie.  It doesn’t smack of major studio schlock.  The problem is that is promises to be so darned intriguing and then drops the ball, almost as if a writers strike led to someone with no imagination completing the script from the halfway point.

Rose McGowan, formerly a delicious woman, looks just . . . awful, post plastic surgery.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A poorly structured and even more poorly shot mixture of a gothic suspense thriller with a vanilla romance filmed in Des Moines, “Dead Awake” never comes close to springing to life.”–Mark Olsen, The Los Angeles Times (contemporaneous)

Dead Awake trailer

FEATURING:  Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton, John Leguizamo, Jordan Trovillion

PLOT: Several people take refuge in a city tavern when Detroit is inexplicably

plunged into darkness; simultaneously, most of the city’s population has mysteriously vanished.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Vanishing On 7th Street is a straightforward sci-fi horror flick.  The premise is uniquely weird, but the movie itself is not.

COMMENTS:  Something unknown has struck the city of Detroit.  Something just … well just awful!  All the lights have gone out, but batteries, small generators, and solar cells still work.  Except that capacitor function is mysteriously waning, and there is dramatically less and less sunlight every day.

Even more disturbing is the fact that nearly everyone has suddenly vanished into thin air leaving only clothing and synthetic personal effects behind, such as eyeglasses, pacemakers and false teeth.  Suits and dresses lie empty, still bearing the shapes of the people who were wearing them, right where they stood or sat when they disappeared.  Driver-less vehicles careen into obstacles and un-piloted planes fall from the sky.

A brightly lit bar on 7th Street that is still powered thanks to a backup generator draws several people who survived the vanishing.  It seems to be the only reserve generator still running, and it is starting to die despite adequate fuel.

What is this inky blackness that is spreading like a kerosene slick, slithering out of cracks and crevices, creeping up from grates, and oozing into open spaces where it devours people?

7th Street has a lot of potential, but the filmmakers try to make the characters “accessible” by having them behave irrationally.  Ironically, it’s therefore difficult to have empathy for them. This is not the fault of the actors, who all deliver competent performances.

A lot of film time that could be devoted to exploring the vanishing phenomenon and to other, even scarier scenarios is wasted with senseless action, bickering and characters waxing maudlin.  The survivors spend a lot of time arguing and doing very stupid, counterproductive things.

Disappointingly, they fail to do the obvious.  Despite the fact that light is protecting them from the darkness, it never occurs to them to build a raging bonfire.  Desperately scavenging old batteries, they never have a flash of insight to raid the Duracell racks at the nearest Walgreens.  One day I would like to see brighter, more pragmatic people being challenged in a horror movie.

On the other hand, if something really happened such as what we see depicted in Vanishing On 7th Street, the film’s participants would probably be typical, given the cross section of the population I observe daily who cannot complete a simple ATM transaction in under 15 minutes.  Perhaps merit in the choice of characters depends upon whether one expects good drama or fictional “documentary.”

The story in Vanishing has a few plot holes, but the basic idea is good and creepy.  Despite wishing I had a fast forward button handy at times, the film mostly kept my attention and gave me goosebumps.

You may not find Vanishing On 7th Street to be the most thoughtful horror movie you have ever seen, but it is still fun.  It is worth a peek for any but the most discriminating horror fans.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“What’s especially maddening about Vanishing on 7th Street is that there are some interesting elements to the film; they just get completely overlooked by the story. Much of the movie is kind of a weird version of the rapture, but its religious imagery is perfunctory and without any real thought behind it.”–Sean Gandert, Paste Magazine (contemporaneous)

Vanishing On 7th Street trailer

FEATURING:  Damian Lewis, Abigail Breslin, Amy Ryan

PLOT:  The lives of three desperate people intersect when a schizophrenic man clings to

sanity long enough to help a distressed woman and her young daughter in the underbelly of Manhattan.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Keane provides a schizophrenics’ eye view of the world. Presented from the protagonist’s unique perspective, we experience his confusion, distress and earnest need to be understood in closeup.  The effect is claustrophobic, frantic at times, and uniquely unsettling.  This makes for a viewing experience that is as unusual as Keane’s compelling odyssey.

COMMENTS:  Intense, suspenseful, unpredictable, Keane is an unsettling story that disorients the viewer by stripping him of any sense of control or foresight. In this harrowing, unusual drama, a mentally ill man struggles to pull himself together when his tenuous personal odyssey is interrupted by a dislocated woman with her eight-year-old daughter in tow.  Keane (Lewis) is frantically searching for his abducted daughter whom he lost in New York’s Port Authority bus terminal months before.  Battling the adversity of delusions and an already unbalanced brain chemistry exacerbated by substance abuse, he aimlessly drifts through seedy Manhattan locales with a feverish purpose.

Querying passersby with a newspaper photo of his child, retracing his steps leading to his daughter’s disappearance, Keane has at best a shaky grasp on reality.  As he teeters on the edge of sanity, he has numerous close scrapes, and we are left to wonder if his daughter and her supposed abduction are real or merely a delusional schizophrenic construct.  Is Keane driven mad because of his sense of guilt over the disappearance of his little girl, or is the entire episode imagined because he is mad?

Keane’s life is complicated, yet conversely given direction when he forms an uneasy alliance with a questionable woman (Breslin) and her bewildered daughter (Ryan) who are mired  in a similarly helpless situation of their own.  Can Keane keep hold of himself long enough to help, and if so, will his efforts bear fruit—or is he being conned?  And what about his missing child?  Is she real?  Can Keane separate fantasy from reality, or will he confuse his situation with that of his new wards?

While Keane shares some fleeting similarities to moments such as the all-night diner scene in Midnight Cowboy, the overall mood of harsh, unbuffered reality, unabashed locations, and the characters’ personal eccentricities compares most closely with Francis Ford Coppola’s 1969 film, The Rain People.

Like The Rain People, Keane offers a stark, almost excruciatingly real and raw, documentary-like dose of gritty people and their situations, unsoftened by mood-setting background music, or storybook establishing shots.  The gloomy, seamy visual footprint is claustrophobic, the settings non-idealized and the treatment of the subject matter unapologetic.

Keane is an unsettling, voyeuristic stare at it’s subject.  Filmed from Keane’s vantage point, the viewer is made to feel like he is that shell of the once sane anti-hero, trapped inside Keane himself, but unable to intervene as a more powerful, perverse alter-ego takes control and carries him along for the ride.  Infused with a mix of empathy and revulsion, we do our best to hold on and roll with the punches as Keane inexorably falters down an uncertain path, doing his best, sometimes falling short, leaving us to hold our breath and persistently wonder, “what next?”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Somewhere between a thriller and a clinical study in schizophrenia, ‘Keane’ is a movie that puts you so far into someone else’s head you may have forgotten your own name by the time it’s over.”–Stephen Hunter, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

Keane trailer

FEATURING:  Eric Lehning, Cody DeVos, Leah High, Brett Miller, Tia Shearer, Jordan Lehning

PLOT: A young man finds one summer love with the reanimated object of his desire.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST:  Skillful blending of genres combined with a premise of genuinely romantic necrophilia make this movie 100 percent weird, without being over-the-top.

COMMENTS:  Patrick and Wendy are best friends for life.  He is crazy.  She is dead.

When Patrick finds Wendy reanimated, he attempts to remedy his unrequited love for her.  Pursing his obsession, his existence spirals into the uncanny.

Thinking, creative-minded viewers will be entranced by this peculiar, arty atmosphere tale. Not a horror movie with conventional thrills and chills, Make-Out With Violence is an unsettling story about love triangles and living death. Dreamy cinematic sequences blend into contrasting scenes of horror and the grotesque.

Brothers Carol and Patrick love best friends Addy and Wendy respectively. Wendy loves Brian, Brian has a fling with Addy, Addy gets jealous when Carol makes eyes at her friend Anne, and Wendy is dead. Dead, and inexplicably reanimated.

Wendy went missing the spring of her senior year. Never found and declared dead the summer before college, she is discovered in a field by Carol.  Undead, but in a semi-catatonic state, Wendy is mostly unresponsive.  Because she was so well liked and admired by all who knew her, Carol and Patrick are compelled take her to the home of an out-of-town friend where they attempt to care for her.

As the summer waxes, then wanes the brothers and their friends pursue their love interests. Carrol dates Addy. And well, Patrick “dates” dead Wendy, both siblings taking time out to tend to her as if such an endeavor is perfectly normal.  All goes well until their love triangles cause them to break their pact of secrecy and Addy finds out about Wendy, with macabre consequences.

Good acting, pleasing photography, and a gentle, artful soundtrack complement wholesome, likable characters, and a dreamy, sepia-toned, perspective on youth and summer. The overall effect makes the cinematic experience like a rosy look back at our idealized impression of golden meadows and free spiritedness of the 1970′s, interspersed with creepy, repellent sequences of undeath.

Make-Out With Violence is a different kind of horror movie, definitely not for a mainstream audience. This film is a well produced, conventionally assembled movie with a truly bizarre plot. It will appeal to fans of mood films such as 2007′s One Day Like Rain, who will find Make-Out With Violence to be infinitely more lucid and coherent.

I am including the trailer below against my better judgment. Whoever put it together should be shot. It fails to adequately convey the essence, tone and substantive impact of the film, making it look like a Generation-X teenage movie, which it is not.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…invests in spacey horror tropes one moment, plunges into absurdist adolescent angst the next and begs questions every step of the way, but just about holds together with its strong compositional sense, killer atmospheric lighting and wall-to-wall music track… the offbeat rhythms of the pic’s non-pro cast cranks up the film’s bizarre intensity.”–Ronnie Scheib, Variety (contemporaneous)

Make Out With Violence trailer

DIRECTED BY:  Andrzej Zulawski

FEATURING: Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Margit Carstensen, Heinz Bennent, Johanna Hofer, Carl Duering, Shaun Lawton

PLOT: A secret agent finds himself in a real mess when he hires a detective to track his

unfaithful wife.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: With campy acting, absurdist elements mixed with existentialist philosophy, arty cinematography, and a story full of all kinds of bizarre and wacky stuff like sex with sea creatures, pointless self mutilation, and people making funny faces for no apparent reason, Possession is practically tailor made to make the List. While I personally don’t think Possession represents a serious effort to convey meaning substantial enough to qualify for the List, I am confident that most viewers will strongly disagree with me.  Possession has a resolute feel about it that will be enough to convince most fans of weird movies that it is a meaningful and significantly weird cinematic endeavor.  Out of deference to those fans I hereby recommend it without reservation.

COMMENTS:  A love triangle among eccentric characters spirals out of control and becomes a love octagon. And the protagonist’s girlfriend is in love with some of kind of octopussy thing.

Sam Neil plays a spy who quits his job to spend more time with his girlfriend and out of wedlock son.  She leaves him, he has a nervous breakdown that leads to a three-week black-out, he meets the new boyfriend who is quite completely insane and possibly a little queer for Sam.

Sam dates his son’s teacher who appears to be his wife’s twin.  Meanwhile the wife leaves the new boyfriend for another boyfriend who is some kind of extraterrestrial octopus, to whom she feeds a succession of uninvited guests, such as a private detective and an insane window inspector (yes that’s right, an insane window inspector.)

In the midst of all of this, the characters physically and verbally convulse in spastic apoplexies of philosophical existentialism, unleash stupid violence against each other, and indulge in self mutilation for no particular reason.  They make extreme facial expressions and engage in crazy talk about their love and angst in a random series of bizarre vignettes.

Yup.   That’s about it.

Oh, and Isabelle Adjani shags the octopus.

We get to see it.

I wish I were that octopus.

Possession starts out looking like an art film, the kind which genuinely has something to express, the type that takes a symbolic, perhaps metaphorical approach to it’s thesis, getting at it’s subject without words, as a concept, in some abstract way.  But about halfway through the picture, this approach becomes tiresome because it dawns on the viewer that in fact, the film has nothing much to say at all, and it has been weird only for the sake of being weird.

Imagine if you will, Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice crossed with Naked Lunch.  If Zulawski has something meaningful in mind that he wants to communicate, he is not a very effective director, because his message is not logically discernible.

There are of course, self-proclaimed “cinephiles” who will presume that if they can’t understand it, and it looks arty, that it must be brilliant, perhaps too brilliant for them to get, though they may not admit not “getting it.”

When asked to explain what “it” is, they will likely just make a smug, knowing grin implying that if we didn’t get it, there’s just no point in even asking.

These are the same cinephiles who will pick out non-existent symbolism and roll their eyes heavenward in great reverence for the genius of it all.  Yes, they will extract not only great symbolism, but maybe also metaphor and allegory.  Then they will praise the arty camera work for it’s skillfulness, as if skillfully produced nonsense has some sort of merit.

Well, screw them.

This movie is long on style and short on decipherable substance, suitable for the LSD crowd, though with it’s schizophrenic script and cinematography, Possession on top of a dose of LSD would be redundant.  For all the money spent on arty sets, stylish cinematography, as well as hiring the beautiful, pre-plastic surgery and breast enhancement Isabelle Adjani (Sam Neill is cute in this too—we would like to see them “do it”), the producers could have made a very dark, creepy film, something along the lines of XTRO.  Regrettably, they lacked such focus, perhaps thinking in their cannabis-induced haze that they were instead creating great art.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…pieced together in an almost hallucinatory manner, with Żuławski employing the fragmented editing of Nicolas Roeg and the surreal plot tangents of Alejandro Jodorowsky… a strange, essential slice of art-horror.”–Matt McAllister, Total Sci-Fi Online (DVD)

Possession international trailer

(This movie was nominated for review by goregirl. Suggest a weird movie of your own here).

FEATURING:  Sara Foster, Cary Elwes, Michael Biehn, Gabriel Mann, Ryan James, Colleen Camp

PLOT: A records clerk working the graveyard shift in a shut-down hospital has puzzling,

ghastly visions that may or may not be connected to a string of murders and her own past. As she strives to interpret the unusual events, she becomes ensnared in the uncanny, plummeting into a morass of sick secrets, murder, arson and madness.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Psych: 9 sports a delightful, creatively non-linear plot. The story is conveyed via a reality-blurring mixture of flashbacks and delusions blended with the present.   Aside from the clever story-telling technique however, Psych: 9 is an otherwise conventional psychological thriller, with mystery and horror elements.

COMMENTS:  Roslyn (Foster) takes a night job sorting records in a defunct, mostly deserted, eerie old hospital. At work, a sleazy security guard (James) likes to leer, her nervous husband (Mann) likes to visit, and an off-kilter detective (Biehn) is taken to calling on her. Her only trustworthy ally is a shrink who is busy sorting records up on the fifth floor, and he’s somehow just a little bit too nice.

The detective is investigating a series of sensational hammer murders in the hospital’s creepy neighborhood, and the shifty-eyed husband, Cole, who drives a taxi, just happens to be in the vicinity every time the murders occur. Suspiciously, Cole can’t account for the whereabouts of, you guessed it, his long, sharp geologist’s hammer missing from his toolbox.

To make things even more coincidentally unsettling, Roslyn was born in the hospital where she now works and has some undisclosed issues about her past. Disturbingly, these past issues connect to troubling uncertainties about her present. Complicating matters, she starts seeing scary apparitions that may or may not really be there. Roslyn also has occasional daydream/nightmares. They are deepening in intensity and increasingly resemble psychotic episodes.

Roslyn does her best to maintain her composure by delving into her duties, and she has her work cut out for her. There are an awful lot of files on an awful lot of patients in the hospital archives. People Roslyn wouldn’t have thought would be patients. And these files contain an awful lot of information, maybe a little too much information. It doesn’t help Roslyn’s state of mind that a killer is on the loose and the records she is sorting include those of gruesome murder victims, complete with graphic police crime scene photos.

Told through a mix of conventional plot points, flashbacks, and delusional visions, the non-linear storyline creates an atmosphere of steadily mounting tension and dread. What the devil is happening to Roslyn? The solution lies within the hospital itself, but Roslyn may discover more than she wants to know when she probes the dark hallways and dusty records for an answer.

Psych 9 gets right to the point and stays on course without wasted footage. The audience is in for a surprise however, because what seems at first to be a typical, even bland haunted house or slasher story is anything but. The empty, ancient hospital is a backdrop and the slasher killings establish a context rather than constituting the story itself. Watching this picture is not unlike sitting down in the seat of a Ferris wheel, only to have the Ferris wheel unexpectedly transform into a roller-coaster.

Like any good amusement park thrill ride, the plot abruptly changes direction and tempo over and over again. As the story progresses it becomes apparent that what appears to be reality has been hallucination and vice versa. What is most compelling about Psych: 9 is not what happens and why, but how it happens.

The significance of the experience is the sense of disorientation Psych: 9 produces and the intriguing way it does so. The viewer will scramble to try to keep his bearing because the plot develops in a way that changes the essence of the story several times. Audiences will continually try to guess what is what, and who is who, only to start over as each succeeding plot point topples every assumption they’ve made.

Psych: 9 presents multiple ideas, each one of which could chart a separate course and storyline. All of these paths could be even more fully developed; doing so, however, would create a finished product that would be exhausting in length. The appeal of Psych: 9 is a matter of formalism. The form is one of writhing convolution, its effectiveness triggered by rapid-fire impact. Because the collective impact results from a successive blitzkrieg of surprises, a more thorough treatment of its subplots would be anticlimactic.

While Psych: 9 is a clever thriller, it is a psychological thriller, not an action thriller. It makes a slow start in order to set the stage and the artistry of its construction does not become evident until well into the film. Jaded splatter fans stand forewarned, and enthusiasts of clever horror which challenges the viewer to guess and think are encouraged.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It aims to be a mystery, a ‘twist ending’ psycho-thriller, a gory horror flick, and a fractured character study at once. The parts rarely mesh. But it’s not a completely lost cause… for a film that’s fairly light on plot, Psych: 9 moves pretty well, keeps you guessing to some small degree (if only because there’s so much weird stuff going on), delivers a few juicy screenplay clunkers and arcane plot divergences, and features a solid little score.”–Scott Weinberg, Fear Net (DVD)

Psych: 9 trailer

Psych: 9 clip 1

Psych: 9 clip 2

More at the Psych 9 official YouTube page.

FEATURING:  Eamonn Owens, Sean McGinley, Peter Gowen, Alan Boyle, Andrew Fullerton, Fiona Shaw, Aisling O’Sullivan, Stephen Rea, Sinéad O’Connor

PLOT: Against the backdrop of Cold War absurdity, a rebellious 1950′s Irish youth descends

into a psychotic maelstrom upon the deaths of his dysfunctional parents and abandonment by his best friend.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST:   Based on the prize winning stream of consciousness novel by Pat McCabe, the movie flows like a grim fantasy regurgitated by a mescaline-intoxicated James Joyce.  The combination of genres and mild-mannered, cavalier narrative of perversity and violence make The Butcher Boy a weird and wonderful, if unsettling viewing experience.

COMMENTS:  High production values and slick editing distinguish this utterly bizarre story about a cheerfully deluded boy’s descent into madness, mayhem and murder. The lighthearted presentation of repellent material makes for a heavy cinematic encounter that timid viewers will find unpleasant and unsettling.

Francie (Owens) is a slightly delinquent youth. His father (Rea) is a talented, but unrecognized musician—and an anti-social, violent alcoholic. His bipolar mother does her best to distract herself from the family’s depressing existence via a zealous plethora domestic rituals.

Despite his oddball, dysfunctional family life, Francie manages to hang on until his mother commits suicide. The tragedy triggers a series of frantic misfortunes that lead to an insidious and inevitable structural decay of the framework that Francie desperately needs for a normal maturation.

Lacking valid coping options, Francie immerses himself in a comic book-fueled world of fantasy, accentuated by typical boyish adventures and games. But the games become increasingly grim when misfortune and his own recklessness lead him ever further astray.

Beguiled by hallucinatory visions, Francie is off first to a Catholic reform school where he stabs a pedophile priest, then to a lunatic asylum where the staff jolts him with shock treatments and a fellow patient warns him of impending trepanation-style lobotomy. Concluding that the damning chain of unalterable events is rooted in a neighbor’s hatred, Francie finally plunges over the dam of reality. Maddened and desperate, he cascades away on the headwaters of a psychotic mission to compel salvation and resolution via maniacal revenge.

The Butcher Boy is a viewing experience steeped in incongruity. The plot is cinematically presented as a comedy. It is anything but. Grim, twisted, and gritty, the sequence of events that unfold are nothing to laugh at. The storybook Irish countrysides of Warrenpoint and Monaghan accent this foreboding tale, and clash with starkly seedy Dublin locations. Discordant hallucination sequences disrupt the balance of reality. The resulting contrast between subject matter and tempo results in an arty, but disturbing film.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Though the movie sometimes looks as if the authentic Irish wit, colour and blarney has been filtered through the sensibility of a Buñuel or Polanski, Jordan never allows the surreal/expressionist aspects to dominate.”–Geoff Andrew, Time Out Film Guide

The Butcher Boy trailer