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DIRECTED BY: Calvin Reeder
FEATURING: Lindsay Pulsipher, Robert Longstreet
PLOT: A young woman blacks out after an automobile accident on a lonely rural road, and wakes up in a nearly deserted world inhabited only by silent women in red robes, truck drivers with a taste for omelets and gasoline cocktails, and man-sized green Muppets.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Though not entirely successful, it’s the most dedicatedly weird surrealism/horror hybrid to come down that lonely pike in quite some time.
COMMENTS: Before The Oregonian screening at the Dallas Film Festival, an almost apologetic writer/director Calvin Reeder came out and told the audience that, if they were expecting to see a horror film, they would probably be disappointed. He (accurately) described the movie as “a surrealist/experimental film with horror splashes” and confessed that previous screenings had seen “a lot of walkouts.” A crowd of about 30 people was on hand. Two people walked out about thirty minutes into the experience, during the “rainbow pee” sequence, a long bit where a bearded wheezing man stops by the side of the road to relieve himself, and his urine stream changes color from yellow to red to green to black. (Ironically, this was possibly The Oregonian‘s best and funniest sequence, and the walkouts left before the punchline). Three more patrons departed soon after, when, in response to the heroine’s desperate pleading for help, a man offers her omelet recipes instead. After that exodus, the remainder of the audience seemed to settle in to the movie’s groove, bursting into laughter when omelet man disposes of eggshells in the toilet and gasping when the shapeless green puppet (which looks like an experiment in splicing the genes of Kermit the Frog with the Cookie Monster) suddenly appears behind the protagonist. Still, not everyone could make it to the end; two more fled at about the one-hour mark, when the whole crew of accumulated weirdos (by this time the shapeless Muppet and omelet man have been joined by a gentle folksinger, a cigarette smoking man and a pair of robed women who don’t say anything but emit deafening screams) suddenly relocated the party from the Oregon woods to the Mojave desert, for no apparent reason. None of the audience members left because the content playing on the screen was offensive or shocking; they simply beat it at the point when their personal tolerance for non-narrative noodling reached its breaking point. The loud and Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: THE OREGONIAN (2011)
Told as almost Gothic horror, set in a sufficiently terrifying seaside villa, Amer starts out with an eight or nine year old Ana, running from room to room, trying her best to outsmart both her overbearing mother and the ugly crone of a witch that was her grandfather’s caretaker, while attempting to steal a necklace she must pry out of her ancient grandfather’s cold dead hands. The film takes on a magical feel right away, as an insidious doom overshadows all that is happening around her and her young eyes are assaulted by the evil that lurks around her and (in a scene of frenetic, salacious eroticism) the writhing, sweating bodies of her parents bedroom. The terror, both metaphorical and physical, that will eventually devour Ana, is already beginning to surround this wide-eyed little girl.
Tess (Rosalind Rubin) is strapped to a chair in a desolate location. She is being held hostage by Nick. In lesser hands this would have been the predictable setup for an adolescent excuse to show a torture fest, but Bilinski and the superb Rubin invest kinetic, tense excitement into the conflict. Nick has poisoned Tess. Her salvation lies in information that Nick requires regarding the death of his wife, Annie (Jen Lilley). Rubin hypnotically conveys fear, frustration, and futile effort as she witnesses humanity slipping away from her captor, who is engulfed in grief. Nick’s ability to empathize trickles away like water into sewage. He is more fascinated than compassionate when the poison begin to take hold of Tess. Wracked with pain, Tess’