FEATURING: Georgie Harriet-King, Paul Richards, Tony Mardon, Kimberley Findeis-Sparkes, Pierce Connolly
PLOT: Diana disappears in the woods: the police know nothing about the case, a paranormal investigator knows less than he might hope, and Diana’s step-father knows more than he lets on.
COMMENTS: There’s a sensation of ensnarement in this corner of England. Widower Kenneth is trapped by dread and lingering grief, having lost his step-daughter Diana in the nearby woods nearby. A burly stranger repeatedly circles a seven-pointed star inscribed upon the ground. A local police detective is trapped by lack of insight. And quite literally, something is trapped in a valise, in a shed. Somehow a pattern emerges from this near-stasis, and ambient clues and portents conspire to trap a psychic who could be the key to the greater mystery.
This mystery, whose nature I couldn’t fully reveal even if I wanted to, seems to be both of ancient Earth and far-flung æther, and James Newton uses this unlikely MacGuffin to bring about a stylish thriller-in-miniature. Feeling alternately theatrical and abstract (and during the brief color sequences, both), When the Sun Stands Still is a delight to gaze upon as the sound design ushers the viewer in. The movie opens on Diana wandering through a copse into a clearing, with sound cues distracting our eyes as hers eventually gaze upwards into the splashy sky, and the world shakes. Crisp framing floats amid an inky void as Kenneth is interviewed by the suspicious inspector, the harsh tone of the dialogue muted by the darkness. Clock-ticks accompany the troubled father, and suddenly we hear his name—and he hears his name—and a cryptic visitor augurs the events’ unravelling.
The pieces don’t add up, and probably can’t, but this is no criticism. James Newton (with co-writer Paul Richards) are not here to tell a commonplace story. As with their previous collaboration, Katernica, there are events that can be explained, and events that cannot—and the viewer must be comfortable in the face of a deep, otherworldly inscrutability.
PLOT: An everyday man finds himself in the midst of conflicts between opposing factions for the possession of a small nuclear bomb.
COMMENTS: The Cold War nuclear annihilation paranoia that raged from the late 1940s to the 1980s left a lasting impact on global cinema. Stanley Kubrick‘s nihilistic political satire Dr. Strangelove (1964) is perhaps the most iconic work on the subject. And who can forget the ominous haunting animation When the Wind Blows (1986)?
The cinema of the former Eastern Bloc followed a slightly different, more didactic approach, however; it tried to offer constructive arguments. Even Krakatit (1948), a Czechoslovakian film following a dreamlike logic, offers a moral lesson towards the end. Romania’s A Bomb Was Stolen, despite stylistic differences, is a product of the same ideological line. The plot follows an everyday man finding himself amidst a chaos of conflicts for the possession of a small stolen nuclear bomb. By pure chance, he comes into possession of a valise containing nuclear explosives, without the slightest idea of its contents. While wandering around town trying to find the bag’s owners, he finds love with a beautiful girl working in the tramways.
The first few moments of this film establishes long shots of deserted landscapes, showcasing a formalist geometrical austerity in the composition, but this aesthetic won’t be sustained for the film. Instead, variety shows and silent era slapstick cinema are the main influences. Silent cinema in fact dictates the style, since dialogue is completely absent. What we have is exaggerated, hysterical acting and a plethora of visual gags—from typical food fights to the most bizarre (an inventive method of assassination). Add in futuristic imagery from a 1950’s sci-fi B-movie and a few stop-motion animated effects and the result is a playful overall tone.
Our protagonist remains an everyday man ignorant of the bigger events surrounding him; but not in a Kafkaesque sense. He is never in real danger, always having a sense of control and agency. In the end, along with his newfound girlfriend (an exemplary representative of the working class) he even have constructive propositions to suggest, contributing to positive social change.
PLOT: Dracula’s estranged son and daughter reunite after his final death.
COMMENTS: A remix of Bram Stoker’s original text haunted by the influences of prior adaptations, Nadja is an atmospheric homage to the Universal monster flicks of the 1930s filtered through the East Village art scene with deadpan Brechtian cool. Bela Lugosi portrays Dracula through clips of old footage. For half the film, the image appears distorted by an aura of supernaturalism, thanks to a pixelating camera. The rest of the cinematography is crisp black and white, interiors cloaked in Expressionist shadows, exteriors swathed in shrouds of fog.
When André Breton met the woman who called herself “Nadja,” she had left behind one life and arrived in Paris seeking another. We meet Almereyda’s Nadja in a similar scene, on a date with a random guy who asks her the usual questions. “Do you work?” “No.” Her father provides for her. What does he do? He has money, family money – old money that goes back all the way to Romania. But she left Europe because it’s like a small village, whereas New York City is the world. She talks of how she wants to change her life. She can sense the potential for change but, as Renfield will remind her, changing your life is easier said than done, even when you’re undead.
The guy asks if she wants another drink. A dangerous question to ask a vampire but apparently the old Romanian money didn’t tip him off. He takes Nadja back to his place and she has that second drink, disappearing before he even knows what happened.
But then she feels it: her father is dead. Van Helsing has staked him, and Nadja knows immediately that Dracula is gone for good. She experiences a sense of relief, the impetus for change she’s been looking for. But first, she has to risk a reconciliation with her estranged brother, Edgar, who for unknown reasons, wants to kill her.
Nadja was one of a slew of existential vampire films released in the early to mid-1990s. It makes a perfect double feature with Abel Ferrara‘s The Addiction (1995), which features a similarly impressive cast, set in New York City just before it drowned beneath a tide of Starbucks lattes. But while Ferrara focuses on gritty street reality, Almereyda’s style is more Pictorialist, providing impressions of a city that never seems quite real. It’s all about the atmosphere, the vampire as symbol, as philosopher, though these musings are delivered with tongue-in-cheek humor, preventing the tone from ever becoming too ponderous or heavy. The story follows the basic outline of Stoker’s plot, but Almereyda introduces additional entanglements and family secrets to a pared down cast of characters. Peter Fonda’s Van Helsing is the embarrassing drunk uncle of Jim (Donovan), a Harker-esque character whose marriage to Lucy is on the rocks. When Lucy catches Nadja’s eye in a bar, she unwittingly sets Van Helsing on the trail of Dracula’s children.
The ending sees the characters, somewhat improbably, whisked away to Transylvania, after some of them inexplicably survive an explosion, but don’t expect an action-packed, blood-soaked finale. The always lovely Suzy Amis delivers a moving monologue on humanity’s bereftness in the modern world, and Nadja finds the change she was looking for.
Nadja largely succeeds as arthouse horror through its unusual visual style and subtle surrealism, enhanced by the strengths of its cast. Löwensohn captivates as Nadja, and plentiful shots focus on her unique face framed by the dark folds of a hooded cloak. She and Martin Donovan were regulars in Hal Hartley’s early ’90s films, where both perfected the technique of delivering emotionally resonant lines with minimal modulation of voice and facial expression. Fonda provides much needed energy as a zany and eccentric Van Helsing. For fans of David Lynch, his brief cameo as a morgue security guard is a nice little bonus.
Arbelos Films recently completed a 4K restoration of a director’s cut approved by Michael Almereyda, which has just finished its run in select theaters and will see by a physical media release in mid-October.
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
DIRECTED BY: James Florian Quinn
FEATURING: Man Without a Face, Kmsura, Dead Flesh, Elektriking
PLOT: The last words of a man on his deathbed are followed by a nihilistic nightmare seemingly representing humanity’s greatest fears.
COMMENTS: Flesh of the Void is a low-budget, experimental horror film that bagged an award for Best Overall Feature and a few nominations—including Best Cinematography and Best Director—at the Nightmares Film Festival in 2017. The fact that its cast is mostly anonymous should raise no eyebrows, considering that the movie includes sexually explicit material and extremely violent scenes.
Shot on both Super 8 and 16mm film, James Florian Quinn employs different techniques that give his work a timeless feel, such as black-and-white photography, film grain effects, intertitles, and a creep– and sleep—inducing soundtrack. In that sense, and in its frequent religious imagery, Quinn’s creation inevitably reminds one of E. Elias Merhige’s (in)famous experimental horror film Begotten(1991), which gives viewers a similar impression of being witness to an old, taboo recording.
Flesh of the Void has no linear plot or conventional narrative, but it does have a sort of theatrical structure, since it is divided into three acts alongside a prologue, an interlude, and an epilogue. It all begins with a surprisingly lyrical and unsettling monologue whispered by a dying man offscreen (“And it all started, to my dismay, soon to set in the state of decay. What just still was will never be again, as I’m still lying in my bed, breathing my last breath”). Then, chaotic images with occasional voiceover ensue, and the viewer is presented with a parade of grainy images depicting increasingly grotesque scenes.
At first, there seems to be a preoccupation with industrial, urban landscapes and the sinister occurrences taking place therein. Afterward, however, violent situations and religious imagery feature more prominently, without any clear links between them and the aforementioned urban landscapes—this overall meaninglessness perhaps being part of the movie’s presumably nihilistic message.
Such haphazard sequences often involve explicit sexual action, and because of these the viewer may get easily sidetracked. At the risk of waxing intellectual, one may regard the combination of sexuality and suffering that the movie presents as the tension between Eros and Thanatos, that is, the two opposing forces that make up human life, with Eros standing for (pro)creation and Thanatos standing for destruction and death. Indeed, whoever decides to watch Flesh of the Void will be assailed by disturbingly brutal situations—including cannibalism and rape—interspersed with numerous masturbatory scenes, often involving the clergy. The latter scenes—which look good on paper as representations of Eros—drag on unnecessarily. They would have greatly benefited from condensing, for their meaning—or lack thereof—is equally impactful after just a glimpse. Such lengthy scenes detract from the overall disquieting atmosphere of the movie and border on the gratuitous.
Nevertheless, occasional shots are genuinely enjoyable despite the budget limitations, especially at the beginning and the end of the film. There is also some respite from cruelty, sex, and interminable onanism in the interlude (titled “Agony”), which is the most theatrical part of Flesh of the Void, with actors moving in ways reminiscent of Greek tragedy at times. This is the most eeriely intriguing and even—dare I say it—tranquil part of the movie, taking place between two acts that feature a great deal of the above-mentioned perversities.
Those who relish experimental movies that feel like inexplicable waking nightmares, no matter how low their budget, may be inclined to give Flesh of the Void a shot. Yet, I must give them a heads-up that their patience is going to be tested, and possibly not rewarded, for the movie as a whole frequently meanders. While opinions will surely differ, for me the nihilistic takeaway from Flesh of the Void seems to be that religious systems and promises of an afterlife are hollow, and we should only believe in the reality of human suffering and the void of death. Suitably for this interpretation, the black-and-white cinematography of the movie is maintained until the very end, when blood suddenly gushes in a vivid red. Cheerful stuff!
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon
DIRECTED BY: Jan Schmidt
FEATURING: Beta Poničanová, Ondrej Jariabek, Magda Seidlerová, Hana Vítková, Jana Novaková, Vanda Kalinová, Natalie Maslovová, Irena Lžičařová, Jitka Hořejšías
PLOT: In the wake of a nuclear apocalypse, a group of women wander the desolate landscape in search of life and sustenance, eventually discovering an old man living in the shattered remains of a hotel.
COMMENTS: There wasn’t a whole lot of software available for the early iterations of the Macintosh computer, but one of the more popular and memorable programs was a simulated game of diplomacy called “Balance of Power.” As leader of either the United States or the Soviet Union, you were tasked with responding to world events in a way that burnished your own country’s reputation and boxed out your opponent. Of course, this leads to political brinksmanship, with each escalation inching the two powers ever closer to the ultimate conflict. If you misjudged the situation, the game concluded with a black screen that provided a particularly chilling finale: “You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure.” It was a real gut-punch to a 15-year-old who only wanted to prevent the USSR from Finlandizing Austria.
I hearken back to this example of video game shaming because it matches the mood set by Late August at the Hotel Ozone. The suggestions of familiar tropes—the post-nuclear landscape, a group of young women fending for themselves, small traces of the world before—set expectations that this film is only too happy to crush. Director Schmidt crafts a stark future with a documentarian’s eye, depicting a world cleaved of hope, where even death loses its power to shock—because there’s nothing else left.
Most of the film is spent in the company of Dagmar, an older woman who recalls the times before the world ended and hopes there might be enough people left to rebuild humanity. In her charge are a group of young women who have learned the fundamentals of survival but have had little opportunity to develop their souls. They don’t say much, but their actions speak volumes. Finding a drum of petrol, they refill their canisters, but then one of them decides to set it on fire, for fun. Another takes the cache of bullets she has found and throws them into the flames, again for amusement. We’re quickly learning that life holds little allure to this group, something reflected in their treatment of animals. A girl rips apart a snake with her bare hands. Another teases a hungry stray dog before killing it with a bullet to the head. When they find a cow that they can kill for sustenance, the women tear at the flesh like ravenous hyenas. (The film’s lore says that none of these animal encounters are faked; if true, we’re also dealing with a snuff film.) Whatever rules we think society should have, they don’t matter here.
So stumbling across the old man at the hotel is like crossing a generational gap. Despite everyone around him having died, Hubert has persisted, maintaining the place in expectation of the day when guests will return as part of a pleasure trip. Dagmar and Hubert find some comfort in their shared experiences, and their very tastes mark them as alien. The girls are repulsed by the idea of drinking milk, and they are clearly baffled by the rituals of a dinner with silverware and candles. Reportedly, several of the performers were not professional actors (one account suggests they were members of the Czech military), and there’s something chilling about their sense of detachment. Hubert’s proudest possession, a Victrola with a recording of “Roll Out the Barrel,” is notable as the one thing that inspires something deeper in the women, a piece of art amidst the desolation. Naturally, it’s more important than life itself.
While the two old people are our connection to the familiar, the fact is that this is not their world. It belongs to the young women who have inherited the dying wasteland, and the violence that ends the film is woefully inevitable. This is an apocalypse for a reason, and this film takes the position that the world will not end with gut-wrenching action or even tear-stained melancholy, but rather with ignorance laced with id-fueled apathy. If we leave our children nothing, nothing is what they will take to their hearts. There will be no reward for failure.
