Tag Archives: Horror

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CAPSULE: KRYPTIC (2024)

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Kryptic is currently available on VOD for purchase or rental.

DIRECTED BY: Kourtney Roy

FEATURING: Chloe Pirrie, Jeff Gladstone

PLOT: Cryptozoology fan Kay catches a glimpse of a monster in the Canadian woods, sparking an identity crisis.

Still from kryptic (2024)

COMMENTS: I think it’s no real mystery why Kryptic fails. It’s not the fault of lead Chloe Pirrie, cinematographer David Bird, or anyone on the visual effects team. The movie is competently shot and acted; it’s a professionally assembled low-to-mid-budget genre film. There is a memorable recurring scene of, shall we say, crytpid gooeyness, and a couple of cool quick-flash shots suggesting hallucinations or buried realities: a face that suddenly takes on a demonic sheen; hands whose fingers, on second glance, appear inhumanly long. All this suggests talent on hand. And the issue isn’t really that the movie is too weird, confusing, or inconclusive, although Kryptic has more than enough strangeness to frustrate the mainstream viewer. But when it works, it works, despite the ellipticality.  No, the problem clearly lies with the screenplay.

The first thirty minutes or so, which set up the premise, are perfectly fine. Kay catches the merest glimpse of a cryptid in the woods while on an (all-female) tour hosted by a Jon Lovitz impersonator; this results in near-total amnesia. While putting together the pieces of her life from clues lying around her unfamiliar car and home, she discovers a news story about a woman named Barb Valentine, a cryptozoologist who recently disappeared—and who looks exactly like Kay. It’s a promisingly mysterious beginning, even if there is nothing especially eye-catching (the second-long encounter with the creature is even less illuminating than the Patterson-Gimlin film).

The last twenty minutes or so are also not really the problem. Some will complain that the final events explain too little, but there is at least a legitimately ian flavor to the proceedings. Most importantly, while the events of the finale are still confusing, they are at least confusing in an interesting way.

No, the problem with Kryptic is clearly its long, meandering second act. Kay follows “clues” which lead her from one mildly quirky but scarcely interesting character (nearly all of them women) to another: a hotel owner, a fellow cryptid enthusiast, a magician in a bar, a trailer park family. None of these encounters make much of an impression or provide much of a clue as to where the story is eventually heading. The only meaningful developments in the entire section occur in our heroine’s head. She starts increasingly pretending to be Barb rather than Kay—or maybe she thinks she is becoming Barb? Meanwhile, she has a lot of flashbacks (or maybe flashforwards) to the aforementioned sticky fantasy involving the cryptid, usually sparked by some observation of sex. Kryptic is not up to the challenge it sets itself of illustrating that interior character arc. The encounters that make up the bulk of the movie act are inevitably dry conversations that could be fast-forwarded through without losing much of value. It seems that the script just did not have enough decent ideas for a full 90 minutes; and yet, the movie runs 102 minutes, and feels even longer. This suggests some basic advice for new directors: when padding a film, add only the minimum amount of scenes necessary to reach feature length.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…pure high strangeness… You can’t always be in the mood for a semen-covered, super weird, mind-melter but it’s par for the course with a kooky cryptid tale.”–Johnathan Deehan, Nightmare on Film Street (festival screening)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE WAVES OF MADNESS (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Jason Trost

FEATURING: Jason Trost, ,

PLOT: Agent LeGrasse is charged with investigating a distress signal from an ocean liner which has veered off course into the center of the Spacecraft Cemetery.

COMMENTS: A throwaway line at the start of The Waves of Madness reveals a great deal in hindsight. Ambling drunkenly to the bar on a massive ocean liner, a passenger seeks a final drink for the night—some Scotch—and is mistakenly served rum. No matter, he assures the embarrassed bartender, “It’s all going to the same place.” Little does our tippler know: it is indeed. Every single passenger, all of them doomed.

Jason Trost wastes no time laying down the story and style in The Waves of Madness, a tight little bit of Lovecraftian adventure that appears to be the launch of his next recurring movie universe. We quickly meet Agent LeGrasse, a professional working under the direction of an unspecified global organization. “The Elders of the Sea” (an ominously christened vessel if ever there was one) has an emergency—one so dire that its distress signal explicitly advises against anyone coming to the rescue. Despite this, LeGrasse boats over, docks his craft, and explores the floating derelict with nothing but his handgun, a few flash-bang grenades, and backpack stuffed with “Plan B.”

Anyone familiar with survival horror video games and  side-scrollers will immediately observe Trost’s inspiration. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen lateral camera movement packed so densely anywhere else. Trost nails ‘game logic,’ too, adding to the experience. LeGrasse discovers an in-g̶a̶m̶e̶ -movie clue about how light can stop the menace, and before a pivotal bit of actioneering, counts aloud to determine how many seconds he has to enact a tricky maneuver. There’s even what appears to be a escort mission (and like most gamers, LeGrasse wants nothing to do with that); but this ends up being part of an underlying ambiguity explored more thoroughly through the three timelines that concurrently unfold as our jaded agent delves deeper into the mystery.

Trost knows his roots in the gaming world—and has now provided evidence beyond the delightfully ridiculous foray into epic levels of DDR in his FP saga. The Waves of Madness isn’t groundbreaking. We’ve seen most of these pieces before: lost cruise ship, strange cult doings, mysterious eldritch entities, hard-boiled gunman, and so on. But the director (and screen-writer, and producer, and one of the soundtrack musicians…) has distilled his various inspirations into a pleasingly particular experience, which will click on all the nostalgia switches for many viewers—and hopefully inspire others to investigate what it is Trost is celebrating.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…as the strong-jawed, eye-patched, laconic Legrasse wanders through this seaborne hellscape as though he were trapped in a Thirties horror adventure or a surreal noir – even though he comes with technology (mobile phones, digital downloads, a portable ‘nuke’) very much from our own age – his own past, present and future become similarly confounded…The highly mannered nature of Legrasse’s experiences on the ship has the viewer too constantly questioning their reality… this is hokey retro fun, turning one man’s trauma into genre-bound pandemonium, and reinterpreting cinema’s fantasy worlds as (un)safe spaces for drifitng pyches [sic] to explore.”–Anton Bitel, Projected Figures (contemporaneous) 

The Waves of Madness

The Waves of Madness
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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ALUCARDA (1977)

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AKA Alucarda, la hija de las tinieblas; Innocents From Hell

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Tina Romero, Susana Kamini, , David Silva

PLOT: When orphaned 17th-century teenager Justine is shipped off to a convent, she meets up with the similarly motherless Alucarda— who happens to be the spawn of the devil—and soon the pair are wreaking havoc amongst the clergy.

COMMENTS: In the recent papal political potboiler Conclave, ’ Cardinal Thomas Lawrence makes the case for the critically intertwined nature of faith and doubt. Certainty, he tells his fellow cardinals, is dangerous because it nudges us toward arrogance and intolerance. “Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery.”

One can scarcely imagine what Cardinal Lawrence would make of Alucarda, a film that hasn’t got a doubtful bone in its body. Given director Moctezuma’s history as an acolyte of Alejandro Jodorowsky, one might expect a certain amount of surrealism or mysticism, but this is a movie that fully believes in the devil and doesn’t find metaphor in a single damn thing. When a satyr cavorts with young girls, communion with Satan can be the only goal, and when you meet the story’s lone skeptic, a doctor who stakes out a position firmly in favor of science and reason, you can be sure that he will learn a harsh lesson in demonic possession and will drop his rational pose at a moment’s notice. Your sense of the film’s credulity is very dependent upon your willingness to believe that biblical evil lurks nearby awaiting its opportunity.

That amusingly unambiguous tone drives the film’s central performance, the teenaged, born-to-be-bad Alucarda herself, who exudes a nervous wild-eyed energy, desperate to win the favor of her potential new playmate Justine, and irrepressibly eager to start being naughty. (Romero, in her 30s, is an impressively convincing youth. Her counterpart, Kamini, is… not.) She’s like a toddler in her emotional purity, which gives her quest to upend the stodgy righteousness of the convent a potent charge. Unfortunately, that single-mindedness serves other characters less well, like the upright, uptight Father Lázaro (Silva, in his final role) who leads a round of self-flagellation to fend off bad thoughts, or the host of nuns whose performances must be reductively but accurately described as histrionic, writhing and shrieking in turn. The world of Alucarda is devoid of nuance, which is a time-saver, but makes the proceedings less engaging.

If there’s one word that sums up Alucarda, it’s “impatient.” Moctezuma aspires to the wildness of Argento or the eroticism of Rollin, but you get the meat of those filmmakers without any of the sauce. It’s mere minutes from Alucarda and Justine meeting a goat man to that same demon leading the two girls in a nude blood ritual, and a full orgy in the woods is just around the corner from that. Moctezuma is in such a hurry to get to the good stuff there that he dispenses with all of the build-up that makes the shock and gore so entertaining. Alucarda is a horror film without suspense, like frosting without cake or sex without foreplay.

As a delivery system for horror conventions, Alucarda is an impressively efficient machine, but that makes it more like a highlight reel or a series of clips on TikTok than like a real film. What it really needs is a little uncertainty, some sense of mystery to give it depth. As it is, Alucarda is like faith without doubt, which some among the religiously inclined might tell you is not faith at all.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This movie is just plain weird… The story is really shallow (girl meets girl, girls worship Satan, everybody dies) and simplistic.” – Alec Pridgen, Mondo Bizarro

(This movie was nominated for review by arlecchinata. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Alucarda

Alucarda
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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: GRIMM LOVE (2006)

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aka Rohtenburg; Butterfly: A Grimm Love Story

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DIRECTED BY: Martin Weisz

FEATURING: , Keri Russell, Thomas Huber

PLOT: An American student delves into the mysterious case of a German man who killed and ate a willing victim.

COMMENTS: In his book Popular Crime, Bill James writes, “Most of us who read crime books, I would argue, do so out of a desire to better understand the fraying edges of society. That is not unhealthy, and we are not titillated by these events.” It’s a reassuring sentiment, one that absolves us of guilt over our fascination with the grisly and sometimes perverse ways in which one of us harms another. So maybe that’s the permission we’re seeking to feel okay about wanting to look closer, as Grimm Love does, at the case of Armin Meiwes: to understand the mystery of the man who ate a willing victim before said victim was quite done dying.

Grimm Love understands our discomfort, which is why it provides a character representing both our curiosities and our qualms. Our stand-in, Katie, is well chosen, since we feel confident that the post-“Felicity”, pre-“The Americans” Keri Russell wouldn’t lead us anywhere that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to go. Her investigation is part of her post-graduate studies in Germany, after all, and if she has a compulsion, it must be because there is something to learn. (At no point does she even hint at what her thesis could possibly be.) Sure, maybe the school principal is going to be offended at the mere suggestion of the awful crime, but that nice lady out on her lawn seems to understand, and so she’ll bemusedly point the way to the murderer’s dilapidated house. People are just interested in these things, you know.

Grimm Love actually presents two parallel stories: a dramatization of the lives of the killer and his victim (here renamed Oliver and Simon, and played as adults with brooding intensity by Kretschmann and Huber) paired with the inquisitive Katie’s linear investigation after the fact. This structure accomplishes two important goals: it gives us a character we can feel less squicky about following, and it pads out the length of the film, because a movie that only focuses on the cannibalistic principals doesn’t have a whole lot to say. From the standpoint of basic historical knowledge, there’s nothing for us to learn, since Katie’s roommate recaps the entire story for us in the opening minutes. We’re left to try and discern just what is so compelling about this story for ourselves, and the answer is wanting. Yes, Oliver has a troubled childhood, abandoned by his father and brother to be left alone with a mentally ill mother. He doesn’t fit in at school, he’s exposed to the slaughtering and butchering of animals, and he has access to illicit content on the internet. But why did he succumb to depravity, in contrast to so many others? No one can say. Meanwhile, Simon suffers an accident when young, then copes with loneliness and develops a desire to mix intense pain with intense pleasure. But at the time he agrees to serve himself up to Oliver, he is in a committed relationship, and he seems to regret the pain he’s about to cause his lover. Why does he remain irrevocably unfulfilled? No one can say.

Russell can shed no light on the subject, either. Her narration repeatedly refers to an irresistible drive, an urge to go deeper, but it’s not because she’s gleaning important facts about the human condition. She’s not taking notes or interrogating witnesses, and she never articulates an insight or a discovery resulting from her research. She’s just drawn to the macabre, tempted to touch the forbidden. She’s a looky-loo. The only questions answered here are mundane: He bit off what? Cooked it and served it to him? How’d he clean up the mess? Grimm Love pretentiously suggests that it has something significant to say, but Katie’s in-the-moment reaction when she finally gets to glimpse the terrible scene for herself gives the game away. And that’s where we end the film: Simon is dead, Katie is utterly repulsed and regretful, and Oliver? Well, he’s just out of meat. End credits. The film has toyed with casting him as a tragic figure, bereft of love at home yet intensely kind and considerate to his prospective food. But his aims are ultimately selfish: he’s killed before, and he hopes to kill again. What we already knew, we now know with matching visuals. It’s not revelatory. It’s just ugly.

It’s okay to be intrigued by the deeds that bad men do. But while sometimes there’s a lesson to be learned about the nature of our society and the monsters that it can produce, it’s also true that  sometimes the monsters should be slain and left to rot. The only message Grimm Love has is that it has no message. If you just want to see inhumanity personified, it’ll do. If you want to learn something, best to do your looking elsewhere.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s an accomplished offering, but there are a few problems with the pacing and what I imagine are directorial choices (a back-and-forth plot devices, a dual narrative, plus flashbacks and imaginary moments).… Sort of a Hansel & Gretel meet Hannibal Lecter mish mash of psychology and horror, Grimm Love may not be perfect — but it’s pretty unforgettable.” – Stacy Layne Wilson, Horror.com

(This movie was nominated for review by Celluloid. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

Grimm Love (Fangoria Frightfest)

Grimm Love (Fangoria Frightfest)
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Apocryphally Weird

59*. REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE (1972)

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Requiem pour un vampire, AKA Vierges et Vampires, Caged Virgins

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“[M]ore than thirty years later, Requiem remains one of my favorite films. In my view, it’s a real naïve film, written naively without thought, almost automatic writing, without prior idea and above all without reflection. It’s nothing else but a simple stream of ideas out of an unconstituted imagination. It’s a real ‘B’ movie with all that that involves. No intellectual reflection, no intentional symbolism. Nothing but this free and disordered imagery which I care so much about.” —, “The Making of Requiem for a Vampire” (2005)

DIRECTED BY: Jean Rollin

FEATURING: , Mareille Dargent, Dominique, Louise Dhour, Michel Delesalle

PLOT: Two teenage delinquents disguised as clowns escape unknown pursuers in a car; their getaway driver is gunned down in the chase. After escaping they remove their harlequin makeup and make their way across the countryside. They are eventually bitten by bats and wind up trapped in the medieval castle lair of a dying vampire and his minions.

BACKGROUND:

  • Rollin’s script for his fourth film, written in two days in a stream of consciousness, evolved out of two scenes: the car chase through the countryside and the piano concert in the cemetery.
  • The first half of the film is nearly silent. Inspired by the pioneering adventure serials of Louis Feuillade, Rollin chose to emphasize the action sequences by keeping them mostly dialogue-free.
  • The art direction was inspired by surrealist painters Clovis Trouille and Paul Delvaux.
  • The dungeon scenes were filmed in the twelfth century Château de la Roche-Guyon, after the crew was evicted from their first choice of castle when the owner caught sight of the film’s nudity. Edmée, Duchess de la Rochefoucauld never saw the script; she agreed to rent her chateau for filming under the impression the story was, in Rollin’s words, “a sort of fairytale.”
  • The dungeon torture scene is ten minutes long, the minimum length of sleaze sales agent Lionel Wallman required in order to sell the film on the international grindhouse circuit. Wallman also donated the getaway car that gets shot to pieces and set on fire.
  • Interpol briefly investigated the film’s production after local gendarmes discovered the shot-up car with Belgian plates in a secluded patch of forest and assumed it belonged to foreign drug traffickers.
  • The cemetery scenes were filmed in a burial ground for medieval plague victims in Crèvecoeur-en-Auge, a small village in Normandy, believed by locals to be cursed.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Many fantastic scenes in Requiem haunt the mind (the vampire Erika playing the organ in a chapel to an audience of skeleton monks, the crimson torture chamber, the master vampire’s coffin in a green-glowing crypt), but the two main characters dressed as stock clowns stand out whenever they appear, whether in a golden field, a collapsing barn, or a cemetery at dusk.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Clown car getaway; vagina bat

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A car chase gunfight along a winding country road; a solitary food truck in the middle of nowhere; a motorcycle in an abandoned water tower; a chapel doorway glowing crimson in the dead of night. Requiem for a Vampire transitions from scene to scene with the abrupt illogical shifts of a dream, as the intrepid heroines traverse a deserted landscape freighted with mystery. Mysterious themselves, the girls transform from clowns to teenage outlaws with handguns in their miniskirts. It remains unknown quite how they’ve ended up here, who was chasing them, and even where “here” is.

Trailer for Requiem for a Vampire (1972)

COMMENTS: Disregard for normal narrative conventions (establishing the setting, introducing the characters) give Rollin’s films a Continue reading 59*. REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE (1972) →