Tag Archives: 2019

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: HOLY TRINITY (2019)

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DIRECTED BY: Molly Hewitt

FEATURING: Molly Hewitt, Theo Germain

PLOT: A dominatrix finds she’s able to speak to the dead after huffing cans of new age air freshener, but her newfound viral celebrity threatens her relationship with her submissive partner.

Still from Holy Trinity (2019)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The plot involves a dominatrix speaking to the dead after huffing air freshener, so they would really have to drop the ball for this not to catch our attention. Spoiler alert: they don’t drop the ball; in fact, the movie comes awfully close to earning the coveted “” rating.

COMMENTS: The character in the Marge-Simpson-sized fishnet hat stuffed with pink balloons wearing two-inch lashes with lime-green eye shadow only gets a couple of lines. She is not a sideshow freak in Holy Trinity‘s strange world, but just a regular background character[efn_note]She is, in reality, the Imp Queen, a Chicago-based trans woman drag performance artist of some notoriety.[/efn_note], like the pattycake-playing human kitty cat or the big bearded medium in lavender robes with flowers in their hair.

By contrast, Trinity, our friendly orange-haired dominatrix protagonist, and her sweet submissive slave, the shaven-headed Baby, are almost “straight” characters. Their relationship is tender, despite the fact that Trinity keeps Baby tied on a leash about ninety percent of the time. They exist in a flipped fantasy world where alternative culture and sexuality is the norm, and normality is nowhere to be found. The giant Glamhag corporation supplies all this world’s needs, from diet sodas to Orixaoco spiritual air freshener. Every living room looks like it was conceived and designed by a drag queen art major while tripping on ecstasy. TV sets are draped in decorative foam. Everyone spends two hours a day putting on makeup and selecting their wardrobe just to go to the corner grocery store. The bananas aesthetic reaches its height at Sunday “church” service, where the local weirdos all gather for a weekly bacchanalia that’s a cross between a Halloween pride parade and a makeshift disco set up at a school cafeteria held on “come-as-a-sexy-nun” night.

Besides all that, there’s visions of the afterworld, a big butch angel, discussion of the ethical implications of psychic powers on the consensuality of bondage and discipline sessions, and shots at the hypocrisy of religion (typified by a priest who’s a big Madonna fan). Also, although everyone in the movie speaks like an American (with the exception of one character who speaks subtitled Portuguese), they pay for everything with Euros. That currency choice is one of the least strange features of Holy Trinity‘s universe, but it strikes me as a good reminder of how far the movie goes to ensure that absolutely everything is off-center.

is the obvious influence here, but instead of the witty misanthropy and satirical ugliness of his early years, or the campy nostalgia of his later works, the movie sets a sunny, optimistic tone of triumphant intoxication and celebration of eccentricity. Holy Trinity‘s universe is a sex-positive, kink-positive, freak-accepting psychic utopia.

Holy Trinity makes its debut at the Outfest Los Angeles LGBTQ  Film Festival tomorrow, July 19. I have no doubt it’s an appropriate and welcoming venue. But while there are plenty of obviously gay and lesbian characters in the film, the central relationship explored here is heterosexual (although ultra-kinky). Holy Trinity is “queer” in the original sense of the word, but I’d hate to see it pigeonholed as an LBGTQ special interest film: like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or the works of John Waters, it speaks to all free spirits and outsiders, even the straightest among us. If, like me, you’re the kind of person who relishes the opportunity to tell casual acquaintances “I saw this movie about a paint-huffing dominatrix who talks to the dead the other night,” you’ll want to prioritize this one.

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CAPSULE: SHE’S JUST A SHADOW (2019)

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DIRECTED BY: Adam Sherman

FEATURING: Tao Okamoto, Kihiro, Kentez Asaka, Marcus Johnson

PLOT: The matriarch of a prostitution empire, married to a violent pimp, leads her gang against a rival band of yakuza while a serial killer preys on her girls and one of her lackeys is caught in a love triangle.

Still from She's Just a Shadow (2019)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This super-stylized, candy colored exploitationer with a couple of precognitive hallucination scenes feels like a budget version of Kill Bill insistent on earning an NC-17 rating. It’s well off the beaten path, but still only on the outskirts of the truly weird.

COMMENTS: A movie that opens with a serial killer binding and tying his nude victim to train tracks and then pleasuring himself as the locomotive approaches is a movie that knows the audience it’s after. She’s Just a Shadow gives you all the perverted thrills you could ask for—sushi served off naked hookers, constant coke-sniffing, an infirmary full of shot-up whores —all wrapped up in a slick, arty package with professional lighting, elaborate costuming, and acres of nudes.

Shot mostly in the neon-lit night or carefully controlled interiors, Shadow is a great-looking film, but unfortunately loses points due to acting that is not up to the professionalism of the cinematography. Former Ralph Lauren model Tao Okamoto has had major roles in Hollywood superhero movies I haven’t seen, so I can’t say she’s an amateur, but she could have fooled me with her performance here. Her line deliveries are almost completely drab and inflectionless; the lack of emoting reminds me of nothing more than Madeleine Reynal’s deliberately blank performance in Dr. Caligari. She smokes a lot, so her long drags off her thin black cigarette help explain the frequent pauses in her delivery. Making his acting debut as a flunky whose main duty in the syndicate seems to be drinking and sleeping with a pair of the girls 24/7, J-pop musician Kihiro is a little better, but not quite ready to be a leading man; his role requires him to be strung-out and exhausted most of the time, partly compensating for his lack of passion. With the two leads being so laid back, it’s left to a bodyguard named “Knockout” (Marcus Johnson) to bring the most energy, though only in a small role. Main bad guy Kentez Asaka can act, but not without a distracting accent sported by none of the rest of the cast (some of whom speak the Queen’s English despite playing Japanese gangsters).

The screenplay, too, is not up to the standard set by the visuals. Shadow‘s characters can be insultingly dumb when it advances the plot. The dialogue treads a line between cliched and risible. Trite ideas are rendered in eyebrow-raising prose: “Both Jesus and the garbageman wanted a little more time when they were carrying their loads up their separate hills,” muses one character. Later he gives us the even cringier observation, “Women… no matter how human they seem, they’re not. They’re just shadows. But on the other hand, aren’t we all?” Lines like these give Shadow an extra layer of unintentional (?) camp, something that doesn’t work entirely against the film—and will likely be overlooked, anyway, by those looking for cheap thrills.

Despite its handicaps, Shadow will slay many with its over-the-top grindhouse audacity. Director Adam Sherman has clearly absorbed a and flick or two, and while the acting is bland and the dialogue may elicit some chuckles, the wild and colorful visuals are up to his influences, and he goes all out to give the audience what they crave, with little filter on the stylish sleaze and depravity. If you’re a fan of modern yakuza exploitation flicks, you’ll probably dig this.

She’s Just a Shadow opens in New York City (and possibly elsewhere) this Friday, July 19; it will probably find a more natural home on VOD soon after.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…exploitation bliss; unfiltered and pure and injected straight into your putrid pupils via a dirty needle.”–DanXIII, Horror Fuel (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: COME TO DADDY (2019)

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DIRECTED BY: Ant Timpson

FEATURING: Elijah Wood, , Michael Smiley,  Martin Donovan

PLOT: Norval receives a letter from his long-estranged father, begging him to come to his remote home to reconnect; daddy is not who he seems, but he does have a lot of deadly associates holding long-simmering grudges.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: The word “quirky” lurked around the back of my mind throughout the first half, until a plot spasm of strange violence brought the weird levels up to floodgate-breaking point.

COMMENTS: Appropriately for a plot that hinges on a theft, there is a whole lot of stealing in the movie: stealing of scenes (not to mention chewing of scenery). That’s to be expected from a film featuring some of the best characters actors in the business, each one-upping the other as the craziness volcano erupts. The heavy lifting (and grand larceny) is done most by Elijah Wood, who surprised me equally with his capacity to normalize the narrative while drawing attention to himself with perhaps the most nerd/hipster/pratt/ mama’s boy character I have ever seen. (While rocking one of the worst haircuts ever to grace the big screen.)

Wide-eyed, apprehensive Norval (Wood) steps off a bus close to the middle of nowhere, California, and walks on foot while rolling a massive suitcase along with him. When he arrives at “a UFO that crashed in the ’60s”-style cabin, he meets his father (Stephen McHattie), whom he has not seen for three decades. They bond, or try to, but mostly Norval endures of varying degrees of abuse. Norval is a recovering alcoholic who describes himself as a combination DJ, pianist, beat-layer, and event organizer; what his father describes him as I cannot type, but the description is apt. At one point mid-rant, his father’s dander rises so high that he has a fatal heart attack while threatening his boy with a butcher knife. Then what’s actually going on starts coming to light.

Watching it with a packed house on a Friday night, I noticed two related things: the audience was far too eager to laugh at things that probably warranted silence, and Come To Daddy‘s sheer oddness (and intensity) was insidious. Rabid fans of Stephen McHattie burst out laughing at the drop of a pin; I sat quietly wondering what, if anything, was going to make a payoff that warranted my attention. The arrival of Michael Smiley’s character (a kind of a twisted, drunken, deadbeat heir to A Field in England‘s effete and sinister O’Neal) turned out to be the harbinger of the film’s madness, and once this madness set in, it did not relent.

As I mentioned above, it doesn’t feel like a slow build up so much as a massive explosion. I came close to writing this off as a wasted outing, as I had with a previous Fantasia buzz-puffed disappointment, 68 Kill. Rarely have I been happier to have been proven wrong, as the investment of my time and focus handsomely paid off. I was left, though, with the burning question, how in Heaven’s name did they get Elijah “Frodo Baggins” Wood to go through this suffering on-screen? But good for him. I look forward to him embracing the role of character actor—albeit on a quite different pay scale than his confrères.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“‘Come to Daddy’ struggles to maintain its zany energy through the final act, and a concluding hotel room showdown unfolds like a quirky, half-hearted sketch comedy in the shadow of the more alluring weirdness leading up to it. Even so, it’s punctuated by a violent act so cartoonish and bizarre it brings the story back to its strengths… the movie finds its way to a bizarre form of closure that illustrate Timpson’s confidence in this strange genre brew. By the end, it all suddenly clicks.”–Reic Kohn, Indiewire (festival screening)

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CAPSULE: THE DEEPER YOU DIG (2019)

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DIRECTED BY: John Adams, Toby Poser

FEATURING: John Adams, Toby Poser, Zelda Adams

PLOT: After running over his young neighbor, Kurt hides the girl’s body in ever deeper depths while her ghost haunts him and her psychic mother begins noticing Kurt’s strange behavior.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Deeper You Dig is an entertaining combination of endearing family dynamics and unsettling horror/possession atmospherics. It is a damn fine yarn spun with aplomb, but it’s more charming than weird.

COMMENTS: I don’t make a habit of staying up past midnight after a full evening of watching movies, but I emerged from the cinema with a spring in my step that contrasted considerably with the despairing sluggishness that had overcome me during the previous movie (the unfortunate Sadako, whose mini-review will be forthcoming). I also don’t make a habit of showering film-makers with unadulterated praise in the Q & A session, either, but frankly, after the satisfaction I received from watching The Deeper You Dig, it would have been almost dishonest of me not to.

On the eve of a snowstorm, a mother and daughter (Toby Poser and Zelda Adams—who are, incidentally, actually mother and daughter) have stocked up on provisions to hold them through the coming days. When mom goes off to work—bilking some neighbor with a psychic tarot reading act that’s more authentic than we’re initially led to believe—the daughter, Echo, decides to do some teenage rebellion in the form of nighttime sledding. Unfortunately, this brings her into the path of Kurt (John Adams), an aloof neighbor, who is distracted by some deer passing his truck on the road after a night out drinking. After hitting the girl, he panics and brings her body to a house he’s fixing up, then panics further when he finds she hasn’t died. On a desperate and destructive whim, he finishes her off, setting off a chain of occult misfortunes.

The Deeper You Dig begins its titular motif with Echo first being “buried” in a tub in an abandoned bathroom before being relocated to a shallow grave (the winter ground is hard), then to a deeper one. As her spatial descent begins, so does Kurt’s mental collapse. This clever hook, like much else in the movie, is executed well: the “Adams Family,” as they refer to themselves, know their tropes and technique. Filmed entirely in the Catskills (less than an hour from my stomping ground, coincidentally), they capture the  watery chaos of last year’s wet winter beautifully. The abandoned house that Kurt’s repairing allows for plenty of truly neat-o camera shots, with one of my favorites being a recurring use of a window overlooking the property’s well. This screen within a screen portends actions of import, as well as a number of the grisly laughs to found throughout The Deeper You Dig.

Am I over-selling this? I doubt it. I know that I was in a rather depressed frame of mind after the big-budget, go-nowhere, God-what-is-wrong-with-you-people? blah boredom of Sadako, but I also know that I found The Deeper You Dig to be genuinely fun, appropriately creepy, and peopled by characters I actually cared about. (Big-budget J-Horror filmmakers, if you’re reading this, take note.) Having swung to a low I haven’t felt at Fantasia since Our House, this little family-horror picture from a genuine-actual family from the Catskills was nothing short of a revitalizing tonic.

You can also listen to our interview with the filmmakers.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a brooding, atmospheric piece of work that points up unforeseen and perhaps unforeseeable consequences to having that one last drink.”–Jennie Kermode, Eye for Film (Fantasia screening)