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CAPSULE: ELENA (2011)

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Heart of a Dog ((The title of a 1925 novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, a biting satire of the New Soviet man.))

The Russian Revolution of 1917 and Michail Bulgakov gave birth to a new biological species: the “dog-man” Sharikov ((The hero of “Heart of a Dog,” made by crossing a dog with a proletarian man)).  The Internet revolution of the 21st century gave birth to the “Anonymous Man.”  The Anonymous Man is a crafty creature who is almost as clever as a dog.  The Anonymous Man has neither fortune, nor any features.  Yet for all that, when herding together, Anonymous Men become omnipotent and invincible.  In ancient times the Anonymous Men used to have another name: “the People.”

The Anonymous Men throng the Internet step by step.  Then they crawl to the Tahrir and Manezhnaya Squares like zombies from a horror movie.  Africa’s colonels are trembling in fear.  The Persian Gulf’s sheiks are hiding out in corners.  The faces of the former masters of Europe are painfully pummeled by statuettes.

In Russia, Alexey Navalny ((A Russian political and social activist who in recent years gained great prominence amongst Russian bloggers and mass media due to his social campaigning activity)) raises the Anonymous Men against the power of the “Thieves and Swindlers.” (( A humorous nickname for the ruling party in Russia led by Prime-Minister Putin.))

On the other hand, the fate of the present idols, the “people’s protectors”, is not much better.  As soon as you raise your head a little above the crowd of Anonymous Men and become a bit wealthier, smarter or luckier, you are punished.  You, Navalny, and you, Shevchuk ((Yuri Shevchuk is a Russian singer/songwriter who leads the rock band DDT.  Shevchuk is highly critical of the undemocratic society that has developed in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.)): once you’ve struck a pose—get a whack!  The anger of the Russian Anonymous Man finds its allegorical counterpart in left-wing and liberal cinema – the so-called Russian “New Wave”. Almost all important Russian movies of 2006-2010—Help Gone Mad, Wolfy, Wild Field, Yuri’s Day, School, Russia 88, The Revolution That Wasn’t and the quasi-national My Joy—look at reality from the little man’s position.  (Ilya Demichev’s Kakraki is a rare exception).  In Russia, a war between the power and the people, the aristocracy and the plebs, is looming.

And now, against the background of the egalitarian left-wing cinema, Andrei Zvyagintsev makes Elena, the most anti-populist film in 20 years.  In the context of current political life, this picture may become the Elite’s banner in its war against the underprivileged of all sorts.  We have seen nothing of the kind since Vladimir Bortko’s film adaptation of Heart of a Dog.

Still from Elena (2011)

If we discard the metaphors, the plot of Elena can be vulgarly described as a battle between relatives for a posh apartment in the center of Moscow: a typical sort of topic for the popular TV show “Time of Court.”  The “new aristocrats,” youngish pensioner Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) and his heiress she-devil Katya (Yelena Lyadova), confront the “grassroots people.”  The Continue reading CAPSULE: ELENA (2011) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: BELLFLOWER (2011)

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DIRECTED BY: Evan Glodell

FEATURING: Evan Glodell, Tyler Dawson, Jessie Wiseman, Rebekah Brandes

PLOT:  Two jobless, hard-drinking college-age kids struggle with relationships as they

Still from Bellflower (2011)

spend their free time building flamethrowers and post-apocalyptic cars out of their favorite film, The Road Warrior.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Try telling people that a movie about the boozy, hallucination-ridden adventures of two slacker dudes who build mad muscle cars in hopes they can rule when Armageddon arrives doesn’t strike you as very weird, and they’ll look at you like you’re crazy.  But you’re right; at bottom, Bellflower is pretty ordinary (for the indie scene, that is).

COMMENTS:  Don’t be fooled by the marketing; despite the references to The Road Warrior, the flame-spewing hot rod centerpiece, and a brutally violent ending, for the most part Bellflower is indie mumblecore drama at its most relentlessly talky.  It’s hard to figure out how to take the movie, because it’s unclear how much of the script is deliberately delusional, and how much is merely myopic.  Thanks to a jumble of flashbacks and fantasies that fill the film’s final fifteen minutes, we’re not sure exactly how tragically Woodrow and Milly’s doomed love resolves, but a more subtle strangeness creeps in long before that.  Bellflower takes place in a Southern California suburb where everyone is over 21 and under 30 years old.  No one who lives there has ever heard of words like “school” or “job” (when Milly asks Woodrow what he does, his answer is “I’m building a flamethrower”), but they all have endless invisible lines of credit to pay for rent, booze, surplus car parts, and munitions.  It’s the perfect movie for anyone who has ever daydreamed about taking off for Texas on the spur of the moment in a car with a dashboard whiskey dispenser (Milly observes “it’s like a James Bond car for drunks!”) to eat truck stop meatloaf on a dare; it’s a dream of endlessly extended adolescence.  On the one hand, the entire story hangs on to plausibility’s cliff by just its fingernail; but on the other hand, it’s presented with hardcore realism—bad beards, overlapping slacker dialogue, and all.  Consider, for a moment, the following exchange.  After Woodrow is struck by a car, possibly sustaining brain damage, his loyal pal Aiden tells him, “you were pretty messed up, mumbling all sorts of weird crap.”  Woodrow asks: “Was it awesome?”  Aiden: “No, dude, it wasn’t awesome!”  This is an egregious example of typical Bellflower dialogue (I didn’t count words, but I wouldn’t be that shocked to hear that 1/10 of the words in the script were either “dude” or “awesome”).  It sounds like it should be a sly comment on the vacuous vocabulary of youth, but there’s little obvious humor or insight to suggest either satire or subcultural self-reflection; it seems aimed at trying to capture “the way people really talk.”  Woodrow and Aiden are obsessed with the “Mad Max” movies and look to Lord Humungous as a role model, but they’re way too cool to believe the apocalypse is literally coming (that would be a different movie).  They’re just extreme, photogenic fanboys with way too much free time on their hands with which to build awesome muscle cars.  It’s possible the entire movie—and not just the apocalyptic, romantic finale—is meant to be nerdy Woodrow’s self-aggrandizing, psychotic hallucination, but the film gives every indication of wanting to be taken seriously as an earnest romantic drama.  In reality, geeky tinkerers Woodrow and Aiden would be delusional dweebs, more Gyro Captains than Lord Humungouses, but Bellflower seems eager to convince us they’re actually awesome lady killers who melt the panties off hot hipster chicks.  To which I can only say: seriously, dude?

As much as I had problems with Bellflower‘s script, which never nails down a sure attitude to its characters’ lives, the technical aspects of the film (especially Joel Hodge’s cinematography) are excellent for a first feature.  Technical types will love this YouTube video the crew put up explaining the “ghetto-rigged” homemade camera they built for the shoot.  This is the equipment everyone will be using to shoot films after the apocalypse.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A weird mix of John Hughes and ‘Mad Max’… with the sunburned intensity of a high-summer fever dream.”–James Rocchi (festival screening)

Capsules

CAPSULE: SOMEONE’S KNOCKING AT THE DOOR (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Chad Ferrin

FEATURING: , Andrea Renda, Jon Budinoff, Ricardo Gray, Silvia Spross, Ezzra [sic] Buzzington, Elina Madison

PLOT: The spirits of two possessed serial killers who rape their victims to death stalk drug

Still from Someone's Knocking at the Door (2008)

abusing medical students.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  If you want unlikeable, unbelievable characters and prosthetic mutant penises, this is your movie; if you want something scary or meaningfully weird, however, look elsewhere.

COMMENTS: The strangest thing about Someone’s Knocking at the Door isn’t the variety of killer genitalia on display, but the bed-hopping, skin-popping residents of what has to rank as the Princeton Review’s number one medical party school.  Besides engaging in frequently fatal kinky sex, these medicos in training spend most of their time taking speed, booze, ecstasy, nicotine, Xanax, Oxycontin, nitrous oxide, and attending Halloween parties where the students egg each other on with cries of “chug! chug! chug!”  Fortunately for the kids, when one of their compatriots is killed via graphic demonic anal rape, the school’s hippie chancellor gives them the week off to grieve at the kegger of their choice.  The students also get high off of vials of experimental psychiatric drugs, while listening to snuff audiotapes so they can catch up on the back story.  (Only after shooting up do they think to look up the drug’s side effects, which include increased sexual appetite, hallucinations, and possible coma.  Oops!)  In a stroke of good luck for the audience, the kids are all perfectly detestable human beings, which means we don’t mind much when possessed serial killers from the 1970s somehow show up to rape them to death.  Jon Budinoff, in particular, never says a kind or sincere word and punches his dates when they don’t put out; he’s so loathsome it’s impossible to believe he could have any friends at all.  On the other hand we recognize as the film’s moral conscience when he objects after finding his socially inept buddy groping a half-nude, comatose female partier who may have stopped breathing (although he’s not so judgmental as to try to stop him).  Knocking is a movie that would love to be offensive, but it keeps tripping over its own silliness.  Ridiculous plot and lack of characterization aside, the movie is technically competent, and director Chad Ferris does put some interesting and occasionally very weird ideas up on the screen.  All of the backgrounds are earth tones or sickly avocados; the film has the color scheme of a 1977 kitchenette.  The genital prosthetics are genuinely nightmarish (the film focuses on the phallus, but the other sex gets its moment to, er, shine as well).  Psychotic episodes are effectively conveyed through stuttering editing that mixes alternate views of the present with brief hallucinations, scored to eerie electronic noises.  At one point, the sound effects even mimic a malfunctioning dial-up modem, a scarier effect than you might think.  And, look closely at the funeral procession for an unexpectedly bizarre surprise.  Other odd moments include a fleeing female who falls a modern record seven times (!) while covering a mere ten feet as she’s chased by a shambling but sure-footed killer.  (In her defense, she may have been thrown off by the fact that the soundtrack was blaring an upbeat indie rock tune instead of the expected shrieking violins).  Add a twist ending you’ve seen before and a strong moral against injecting experimental psychiatric medications for kicks, and you have a strange, if uneven, modern exploitation horror.  If grindhouses existed today, this is what would be playing there.  A mixture of time-tested horror clichés, careless scriptwriting, and mucho grotesquerie, Knocking features enough sex, violence and general outrageousness to save it from being boring, and enough stylistic innovation to (mostly) camouflage its derivative slasher story.  Fans of modern disgusto horror will open up gleefully for Someone’s Knocking at the Door, but others will want to turn off all the lights and pretend no one’s home.

A title credit sequence featuring a vintage shower of pharmaceuticals cut with grainy 1960s home movies announces that this is a movie aimed squarely at the horror/stoner crowd, the genre’s largest unacknowledged demographic.  In a clever exploitation-style marketing move, the poster and DVD cover features black censor bars not only over exposed naughty bits, but also over the actors’ and actresses’ eyes, giving the movie an extra aura of pornographic depravity.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…eschews the standards of the youth-horror genre, opting instead for something more hallucinatory.”–Michael Gingold, Fangoria (DVD)

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CAPSULE: TO DIE LIKE A MAN [MORRER COMO UM HOMEM] (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: João Pedro Rodrigues

FEATURING: Fernando Santos, Alexander David, Gonçalo Ferreira de Almeida, Chandra Malatitch

PLOT: A conflicted pre-op transsexual drag queen lives with a suicidal junkie.

Still from To Die Like a Man (2009)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  I originally wrote: “it’s in the weird ballpark, but Man would need radical surgery to become the poignantly bizarre gender fairy tale it dreams of being.”  As discussed in the comments below, the version of the film I saw was not the version the director intended; but, the film I watched wasn’t quite strange enough to make it onto the List, and restoring the author’s vision would only make it less weird.
COMMENTS: Funny story. It turns out that To Die Like a Man isn’t nearly as annoying as I thought it was. One of the first notes I jotted down in my initial viewing of the film read “telepathic commandos?” This is because the film opens with a scene of two men in camouflage in the woods staking out a house occupied by two men in drag. The soldiers speak to each other and their lips move, but there’s no sound; we read their conversation in subtitles. It seemed like a curiously weird way to start the film, but the silent dialogue continued through the film’s entire two-hour plus running time; we can hear sounds in the background, we can hear it when characters sing or sob, but when they speak—nothing. Although we’re accustomed to reading titles in foreign or silent movies, to hear birds singing and leaves rustling, see an actor’s lips moving, and yet be banned from hearing their words proves far more frustrating and irritating than you would think. It robs the actors of half their expressiveness and inhibits our bonding with their characters.

I assumed the silence was an alienating technique designed to put us inside the estranged worldview of Tonia, the confused pre-op protagonist. But, it turns out there was a simpler explanation for the motif that I hadn’t thought of. As it turns out, someone botched the preparation of the digital version I saw via Netflix’s streaming service so that the dialogue track was completely missing. Oops. For that reason, I can’t really give To Die Like a Man a Continue reading CAPSULE: TO DIE LIKE A MAN [MORRER COMO UM HOMEM] (2009) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE BABY (1973)

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DIRECTED BY: Ted Post

FEATURING: Ruth Roman, Anjanette Comer, Marianna Hill, Suzanne Zenor, David Mooney [as David Manzy]

PLOT: A social worker becomes obsessed with a case involving a family with an adult son with the intellect of a one-year old, who sleeps in a crib and wears a diaper.

Still from The Baby (1973)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Baby‘s infantilism premise, which is handled with an almost disconcerting matter-of-factness, is outlandish, but the film is fairly conventional in its execution.

COMMENTS: Although it has a minor cult following, for the most part The Baby is a fairly ordinary thriller with low production values.  Director Post had previously worked extensively in television, and his direction here shows it: it’s efficient, competent, but unexciting.  But the colorful material overcomes the pedestrian direction, and you can see why this one stuck in people’s memory: the film “stars” an actor in his twenties who sucks his thumb and sleeps in a crib, and no one in the movie seems to think this is the slightest bit odd.  His teenage babysitter even changes his adult-sized diapers without a second thought.  That The Baby is also filled with hints (and often more) of psychosexual perversity—infantilism, sadism, pathological possessiveness—doesn’t hurt its memorability quotient a bit.  And despite the movie’s made for TV feel, there are a couple of things that it does very well.  The acting is uneven, but Ruth Roman brings verve to her role as the bitter old matron who’s willing to do anything to keep her Baby.  She channels Joan Crawford’s looks, Suzanne Pleshette’s voice, and Shelly Winters’ orneriness; by the end, she’s become a Ma Barker-style family queenpin, masterminding plots and directing her two oversexed girls on kidnapping and rescue missions.  (Perhaps coincidentally, and perhaps not, the family’s “two sexually predatory sisters and a nonverbal idiot brother” sibling structure replicates the even weirder clan from Jack Hill’s Spider Baby [1968]). Roman provides so much bitchy fun that you wish she’d thrown all restraint out the window and gone into full bore Mommie Dearest histrionics (if she had, the film really would be the undisputed camp classic it claims to be).  The downside of Roman’s charisma is that she sets off the soap opera-level talents of the pretty but vapid actresses hired to play against her.  Speaking of bad acting, though, nothing beats David Manzy’s head-lolling, mouth-breathing performance as Baby.  His attempts at infantile mewling and babbling are embarrassing.  Maybe that’s why (some viewers report) in earlier television screenings of the film, Manzy’s voice was overdubbed with the cries of a real baby!  It’s hard to say Manzy’s performance is bad—we don’t really have any other adult infant characters like Baby to compare it against, and maybe this is exactly how a twenty-year old with the brain of a one-year old would act—but it is ridiculous-looking.  Besides Roman’s performance, the other thing that stands out about The Baby is the twist ending.  For most of its running time, the movie does the minimum necessary to keep you interested.  There will be long sequences of the social worker visiting Baby, lightly fencing with Roman and her daughters over the best interests of the child, and just when you start checking your watch and wondering whether this is all the movie’s got, bam—Baby will do something wrong and need to be punished, providing another kinky plot development that gives the film life again for a few more minutes.  The twist ending operates in the same way, coming after the movie has taken an unexpected but unsuspenseful detour into slasher movie territory for the climax, with characters being picked off one by one in a too-dark house.  Then, just as you’re about to yawn and put The Baby to bed, there’s a pleasantly perverse little jolt at the end that wakes you up and makes you look at the film with new eyes.

Severin Films re-released The Baby in 2011 in a widescreen version remastered from the original negative.  The movie had previously been available on DVD in a couple of inferior incarnations, one from Image Entertainment and in a no-frills full screen version from the now-defunct Geneon, a company specializing in anime.  Severin’s release  adds only a few extras—the original trailer and telephone interviews with director Post and “star” Mooney—but it’s the best presentation the film’s fans are likely to see for an almost 40-year old camp thriller.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strangely interesting little curio. If you’re in the mood for something unabashedly off-the-wall, then it should be worth your while to check it out.”–porfle, HK and Cult Film News (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by our own Eric Gabbard,who called it “weird but well constructed.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)