All posts by Pamela De Graff

I live in smoggy southern California where I am an arts major at a state university. My cinematic interests include dark movies like moody, brooding horror, the morbid, the macabre, the uncanny, occult films and black satire. I prefer movies with well executed plots which make me think.
Shorts

SHORT: SOME FOLKS CALL IT A SLING BLADE (1994)

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DIRECTED BY:  George Hickenlooper

FEATURING:  Billy Bob Thornton, J.T. Walsh, , Jefferson Mays, Suzanne Cryer

PLOT: A peek inside an asylum for the criminally insane as a mentally retarded double

murderer chats with a diabolical fellow inmate before being interviewed by a newspaper reporter on the day of his release.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade is a short film with unusual subject matter.  The viewer is treated to a vignette portrait of a murderer in an insane asylum.  There is a glimpse of his twisted companion, and a look at the sorts of confused, eccentric bureaucrats who run the place.  All of this is presented against the backdrop of the controversy of social attitudes about the patients.  The piece is strangely cemented together with the premise of a newspaper reporter trying to get an interview with the murderer on the day his sentence expires.  Odd as the setting and premise are, Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade is really just a demo-clip.  The idea was to get the concept of Billy Bob Thornton’s ability to portray Karl Childers out into the greater film community in order to locate backers and pitch a full-length movie.  It worked, and the mainstream picture Sling Blade was the result.  Most of  Some Folks Call It A Sling Blade is filler, the premise with the reporter being used to make the film longer than a screen test.  As such, the film lacks the substance and quality to be a truly weird movie.

COMMENTS:  In this short film predecessor to Sling Blade we observe a day in the life of a criminal mental patient who is on the verge of social repatriation.  Karl Childers (Thornton) chats with a fellow inmate in an institutional day-room.  Meanwhile, reporter Teresa Tatum (Ringwold) is waiting to interview Childers.

Tatum, who is working on a feature exploring the controversies of releasing criminal patients back into society, pontificates frivolously at long length with a companion (Cryer), then spars with a hesitant and quirky chief hospital administrator (Mays).  Eventually, we are allowed to see Thornton’s skillful performance as Childers when he explains to the reporter the circumstances of his crime.  The interim would be dreadfully uninteresting time filler were it not interspersed with several astounding segments in which J.T. Walsh plays the part of a funny, congenial, but very scary psychotic killer.

The annoying Molly Ringwold, an actress of very modest proportions, puts us to sleep with a Continue reading SHORT: SOME FOLKS CALL IT A SLING BLADE (1994) →

Guest Reviews

RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: LOVE OBJECT (2003)

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DIRECTED BY: Robert Parigi

FEATURING: Desmond Harrington, Melissa Sagemiller, Udo Kier, Rip Torn

PLOT: In a deviant twist on the Pygmalion myth, a man’s infatuation for a life-like sex doll

evolves into a sinister love triangle when he becomes involved with a coworker.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Love Object, like Lars And The Real Girl which came after, is about a lonely introvert who buys a realistic sex doll for companionship.  Like Ken in Love Object, Lars comes to yearn for a coworker, but has trouble making a connection.  Lars and the Real Girl is a cute movie about the human spirit, and the socialization and evolution of a lonely man.  With the help of his doll and coworker, Lars comes out of his shell, grows and triumphs. In this way, Lars And The Real Girl, while employing a weird vehicle to make its point (the love doll) is more or less a mainstream comedy-drama, no more odd than a Cyrano de Bergerac theme such as Roxanne (1987).

Love Object, however takes a twisted path.  The weird idea of needing the love doll is used to define the protagonist’s nature, but it gets stranger from there.  Ken’s obsession with the doll is not a positive step in the evolution of his character.  It leads him down a dark perverse path toward madness, violence and ruin.  The plot is sick and creepy, the content perverse, and it is skillfully handled, making Love Object a good candidate for the designation of being truly weird.

COMMENTS: It’s tempting to insert some sophomoric humor into this recommendation, but the jokes would be all too predictable.  Despite delivering many elements of black comedy, the overall tone of this surprisingly violent sardonic yarn is serious.  Love Object grimly depicts a bizarre theme with good pacing and artfully blended visual continuity.

Kenneth Winslow is the kind of cold, compulsive dullard who alphabetizes his jock straps.  Taking more interest in the technical world than the human one, Ken writes instruction manuals for electronics —you know, the ones nobody reads.

A joker at work shows Ken a photo of an alluring girl named Nikki, and he is at once smitten.  Nikki is a life-like sex doll, so realistic that Ken can’t detect the substitution.  No devil with the Continue reading RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: LOVE OBJECT (2003) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: FUNNY GAMES (1997)

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DIRECTED BY:  Michael Haneke

FEATURING: Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Mühe, Arno Frisch, Frank Giering, Stefan Clapczynski

PLOT: Held captive by two charming but very twisted psychopaths, a family tries to outwit them as they are forced to play sick parlor games.

Still from Funny Games (1997)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Funny Games is a more substantial captive torment tale than most. It features enigmatic villains, and unconventional breaking of the fourth wall.  At times parts of the plot are relayed from different points of view. But overall it is still a straight-forward psychological thriller, too conventional in structure and subject to be considered weird.

COMMENTS:  With son Schorschi (Clapczynski) in tow, rich yuppies Ana and Georg (Lothar, Mühe) arrive at their vacation house on a remote mountain lake ready for a quiet summer of relaxation and solitude. And what better setting for it than a security gated compound in a security gated community where everyone minds his business and doesn’t come knocking unless invited?

Despite their hi-tech Maginot line of fortified privacy, Ana and Georg have no phone line to their house. Their only link to the outside world is Ana’s cell phone and she’s not prone to be careful with it. No matter. Nobody is planning on getting in touch with them, nor is anyone expecting contact from the couple for a few weeks. Or longer.

Of course, all of the security in the world is useless when one lowers the drawbridge to admit a Trojan Horse. Charming Peter, a guest of friends down the way, shows up to borrow some eggs, and of course Anna lets him right in. Peter accidentally destroys her phone, and then just can’t seem to leave.

Peter’s friend Paul arrives, and the next thing you know, the family watchdog is mysteriously dead. Now neither Peter nor Paul can seem to get out the door and go home. Georg. who had been out, returns and won’t listen to Ana’s assertion that the beguiling young men are trouble. One mustn’t be rude to guests. Georg discovers too late that he should have listened to wifey for a change. He meets the business end of one of his own golf clubs—with his knee. And a Continue reading CAPSULE: FUNNY GAMES (1997) →

List Candidates

BORDERLINE WEIRD: THE MACHINIST (2004)

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DIRECTED BY: Brad Anderson

FEATURING: Christian Bale, , Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, John Sharian

PLOT: A troubled man tries to solve the riddle of his fragmented existence as he becomes

Still from The Machinist (2004)

increasingly tormented by strange visions and apparitions.

WHY IT ‘S ON THE BORDERLINE: The events which unfold in The Machinist are hard to wrap one’s mind around.  It is difficult to ascertain what is real and what is unreal.  Other, more cleverly thought-out films, have handled this same premise with more finesse, however.

COMMENTS:  Honestly? I liked this movie much better THE FIRST NINE TIMES I SAW IT! When it was called:

Dead and Buried (1981), and
Final Approach (1991), and
The Sixth Sense (1991), and
Crazy As Hell (2002), and
The Return (2003), and
Stay (2005), and
Dark Corners (2006), and
Salvage (2006), and
Cold Storage (2006).

The Machinist is a well made Spanish puzzler that waxes somewhat melodramatic.  However, the triggering event for its basic premise, while not overly preachy, is well, kinda damn preachy.  Additionally, somebody should have told the filmmakers that this plot has been produced before (OK, nearly every plot has been previously used one way or another. To wit: Brett Sullivan’s The Chair is basically The Skeleton Key or Child’s Play repackaged, but the premise of The Machinist has been done a LOT.  As such, redoing it yet again demands a very fresh take, and an unconventional handling of the idea).

In The Machinist Christian Bale plays, you guessed it, an industrial machinist who lives and works in a creepy industrial park (the movie was filmed in Barcelona, so you bet they found an imposing-looking one, although a similar location in Bilbao might have been even more grim.)  Continue reading BORDERLINE WEIRD: THE MACHINIST (2004) →

Guest Reviews

CAPSULE: THE CHAIR (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: Brett Sullivan

FEATURING: Alanna Chisholm, Lauren Roy, Nick Abraham, Paul Soren

PLOT: A new tenant in an old house is sucked into a sordid, violent riddle when she

Still from The Chair (2007)

discovers evidence of sick psychological experiments.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Chair offers a novel twist on the age old soul possession concept, as seen in films such as Child’s Play or The Skeleton Key.  That twist is perverse and unsettling.  The movie becomes puzzling when parts of the story are told non-sequentially,  from changing perspectives.  While it may have an unconventional feel, The Chair is still a more or less standard horror story about a soul seeking a new host.

COMMENTS:  Don’t be fooled by the opening shots when you watch The Chair.  It is not as customary as it appears to be.  It tricks the viewer.  Not fast-paced enough to be a horror-thriller, The Chair is an imaginative horror-mystery with puzzler and shocker elements.  The film develops it’s storyline differently than other supernatural vehicles.

Here is the setup: Danielle rents a creepy Victorian house (is there any other kind?) where slightly sinister things start to occur—slowly.  Due to the mildness of the events, and because the movie would last all of five minutes if Danielle left, she doesn’t think of simply moving out.

Oh, and conveniently, Danielle is a psychology student with an interest in the paranormal.  She wants to capitalize on the spooky bumps in the night and investigate them to have material for her senior thesis.  (Apparently Danielle has enough imagination to take an interest in parapsychology, but not enough to pick a no-brainer psychology research topic like ‘partial reinforcement similarities between cocaine and World Of Warcraft.’)   Lucky for us, because someone has to stick their neck out or we would be watching another mild-mannered Poltergeist retread.

And so Danielle pokes around the creaky manor and turns up eerie hidden rooms, bizarre metaphysics documents, disturbing furniture, and puzzling mechanical parts.  All of this leads her to discover that an occult scientist  a century before found some very interesting uses for mesmerism when he dabbled in suspended animation, the trapping of souls, and other funny business.  The results of his efforts created a lasting malevolent Continue reading CAPSULE: THE CHAIR (2007) →