PLOT: A girl ventures into unknown territory when she helps her lover, a former torture victim, seek revenge on her one-time captors, in this bloody tale of madness and sadism.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: You may have heard incomplete descriptions of Martyrs in the media or by word of mouth. Hushed references and whispered gossip might make it sound like a snuff movie, a sado-masochistic tableau, or a scandalous exploration of taboos. It is none of these things. While Martyrs is a heavy, very violent film with a grim story, it is not a snuff movie or a sensational expose of torture. It is an offbeat, horrifying thriller, and nothing more.
COMMENTS: When Anna (Alaoui) and her lover Lucie (Jampanoï) embark on a mission of revenge against Lucie’s childhood torturers, the situation quickly spirals out of control. The couple locates Lucie’s alleged abductors, but did they find the right people? Lucie is stalked and victimized by the spectre of the mutilated sister she had to leave behind, and Anna is not so sure where the truth lies. In the process of exacting retribution the landscape changes dramatically and Anna is swept into an incomprehensible morass of hell on earth.
I’m so underwhelmed! I was expecting a real stick of dynamite, but instead, I got one of those Fourth of July smoldering snake novelties. Movie site rumors and an ongoing debate over whether or not Martyrs amounts to little more than “torture porn” made me expect a wild ride. I had hoped to see the ultimate horror movie, or at least something mindlessly vulgar and sensational, but no dice.
What I got was an extremely well-shot, conventionally produced, offbeat story. Unfortunately, it consists of two loosely linked plot sequences which, once combined, don’t amount to a sum greater than their parts. Nor do they deliver any sort of soul stirring revelation. Ho hum.
PLOT: An artist is haunted by memories of his past. While isolated on an island with his pregnant wife, his demons catch up to him. Madness and delusion creep deeper into his mind as a gang of mysterious island dwellers intervene in the couple’s life. A secret, scandalous affair surfaces, and when supernatural forces intervene, the couple’s relationship and sanity is strained.
WHY IT SHOULD’T MAKE THE LIST: This is a tough film to decipher. The ending is certainly weird, but the lead-up to that point is too ponderous and ambiguous. Bergman is a master and his lone foray into the horror genre is an excellent piece of film-making; his artistry in delving into the lower depths of the human psyche is better established in his other well-known masterpieces, however.
COMMENTS: The older I get, the more I appreciate Ingmar Bergman films. There is something about Swedish movies that encapsulates human existence like no other country. Scenes are left dangling on a thread waiting to snap. The slow, or still, images can verge on monotony, but are usually necessary to convey the pathos of the souls here. Sometimes watching scenes slowly transpire is the best way to fully grasp how life can unravel around us. A scene in this film actually plays out for an entire minute with the main character staring at his watch to express how even sixty seconds can feel like an eternity. Time can sometimes lay heavy on a burdened mind. What I’m trying to suggest here is that Bergman is amazing at capturing exactly what it means to be human. We sin and regret, yet we still long for penance and understanding. Even when our existence feels loathsome, it sure is nice to have someone else around to share in our misery. Modern Swedish director Roy Andersson (You, The Living) knows this as well and, like Bergman, his films are wrought with longing stares of sadness. Both Swedes capture these depressing moments and bring them alive with precise balance and well thought out execution. Even dialogue is matter-of-fact. Nothing said in their films seems to be unimportant or drivel; it’s Continue reading CAPSULE: HOUR OF THE WOLF [VARGTIMMEN] (1968)→
FEATURING: Joel Moore, Amber Tamblyn, and Zachary Levi
PLOT: A gregarious young professional befriends a complex loner at work and unleashes
madness when she tries to unravel his convoluted personal secrets.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While Spiral tells an offbeat story, it contains no outstanding weirdness, aside from the very odd personality of the lead character and the bizarre nature of his relationships. In fact, it is the straightforward way in which the story is told that is responsible for its hypnotic feel and impact.
COMMENTS: Overcast Portland, Oregon locations grace this gloomy and grim, offbeat psychological suspense story about a deeply troubled artist. Spiral spins the whorled, offbeat portrait of a lead character with an odd personality and bizarre personal relationships.
Mason (Moore) is a painter working as an insurance telemarketer. He excels at his job, maintains a nice bachelor pad, and despite his gross social awkwardness and timid appearance he has tremendous luck with the ladies. In fact, he has had a succession of girlfriends who all pose for his oil and canvas portraits.
Despite all that he has going for him, Mason is tortured and confused. A shy loner at work, he feels trapped in his overly bright, sterile, corporate cubicle. The nervous Mason is coiled so tightly that he’s about to spring out of his skin. To make matters worse, he is prone to asthma flare-ups triggered by extreme night terrors and panic attacks.
Mason harbors more than a few skeletons in his inner footlocker and they are especially grim. Like malevolent phantasms, dreadful images of his past girlfriends twirl our of his dreams and splash across his conscience like spatter from a centrifuge. Striking terror, these hit and run specters jar Mason out of deep slumbers, and slap him out of daydreams. The experiences leave him in a cold, sweaty daze, scrambling for his asthma inhaler with a racing heart.
Mason’s only safety net is his cocky, but empathetic boss, Berkeley (Levi)—who is also his only friend and advocate. Willing to act as Mason’s ad-hoc therapist, Berkeley is the closest thing Mason has to some much needed Xanax. Suppressing Mason’s panic with a combination of good-natured ridicule and reassurance, he talks his frightened employee down like Rasputin hypnotically calming Czar Nicholas II’s hemophiliac son. The effect is temporary, however, as Mason seems to be plagued not only by the serpentine hallucinations, but by a wide range of deeply seated personal issues, all indicating a winding, ganglionic tangle of dark, hidden secrets.
Berkely begins to find his role as counselor diminished when a bubbly new employee named Amber (Tamblyn) jumps on board and takes a shine to Mason. Inexplicably attracted to the shy salesman, she is like a schoolgirl rescuing a baby bunny. Intrigued by the dark enigma of Mason’s persona, Amber radiantly circles Mason, determined to unravel his helical psyche by patiently prying away at the repressed layers of his complicated personality.
Mason gradually warms to her efforts and finally admits her to his inner world. Once inside, Amber wreaks havoc like a Trojan horse when she realizes too late that she has opened a Pandora’s box. But how genuine is Amber? Is she really who she appears to be? What does Berkeley know about Mason’s past girlfriends that he isn’t telling Mason? And why the haunting visions? As tensions reach the meniscus, unanswered questions brew a churning swirl of fantasy, reality and bedlam as Mason, Amber and Berkeley cross paths in a twisting maelstrom of truth and lies.
Crisp audio processing of the soundtrack compliments the high definition DVD release of this Santa Barbara Film Festival entry. Spiral is the directorial collaboration of Joel David Moore and Adam Green, who worked as actor and director respectively on the 2006 slasher film, Hatchet. Spiral was co-written by Moore with Jeremy Danial Boreing. Amber Tamblyn may be known to some viewers from her roles in The Grudge II (2006) and The Ring (2001).
PLOT: A disturbed man is released from a mental institution and sent to live in a halfway house. While there, he traces back to his childhood to remember a troubled past and the tragic events that shaped his current mental instability.
WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:To compile a list of the weirdest movies ever made, one would be hard-pressed not to include Cronenberg’s entire oeuvre. Here, the director eschews the “body horror” that encompassed much of his earlier films and focuses solely on the deterioration of the mind. While this can be just as grotesque as horrors of the flesh, the journey can get so convoluted at times that the weirdness teeters on a fulcrum. Eventually, the confusion weighs too heavy and topples the weirdness into mere befuddlement.
COMMENTS: A cinematic pet peeve of mine was surely tested with this movie. Being American, I shouldn’t have to struggle listening to an English film (i.e., UK-Great Britain). We speak the same tongue, albeit with some slight variances in words and phrases. The cockney accents in this film can get so thick at times I considered reaching for the subtitle button on the remote. To make matters worse, the film focuses on the character of Spider (Fiennes) who mumbles and spews gibberish as a means of communication. Actually, most of his conversations are only with himself. I loathe having to toggle the volume levels up and down. I had to do this for the duration of the film. Aside from this aggravation, Spider is not a bad film; nor is it a great one.
I loved the approach taken in the opening credits. Various textiles and walls are displayed artistically with corrosion and chipped paint, each frame containing a pattern or form that is open to interpretation. It is set up to resemble Rorschach inkblot tests used in the psychiatric field (I must be going mad myself because all I see in them are cool looking demons). These opening credits are effective because they prepare the viewer for a movie that deals with an imbalanced mind. What we perceive to be truth is certainly going to be skewed from the perspective of a protagonist with warped sensibilities.
FEATURING: Jeong-Myeong Cheon, Hee-soon Park, Shim Eun-Kyung, Eun Won-Jae
PLOT: Eun-Soo, a young man whose girlfriend has just told him she is pregnant, crashes his car on a lonely road and finds himself rescued by a young girl, who leads him to a strange cottage hidden in the depths of a dense forest. The family living there tend his wounds and put him to bed. His gratitude soon turns to fear, as the “parents” disappear and he is left in charge of three children who have no intention of letting him leave.
WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: Much as I love this film I doubt it makes the final cut. Yes, it’s odd, beautiful and moving, but it could stand more ruthless editing, something it shares with the director’s previous Antarctic Journal. The storyline is predictable in parts, especially if you’ve seen a number of “bad seed” films. The style makes it stand out but, honestly, some of the weird scares seem to be a little misplaced. Hansel and Gretel‘s weirdness seems tattooed on rather than bred in the bone.
COMMENTS: Watching Hansel and Gretel is like settling down to enjoy a nice cup of tea and a fondant fancy, only to discover that your cake is crawling with ants. The set design is fascinating; wherever you look there is some odd detail that catches the eye. The color palette is lush, just the green of the woods is breathtaking. The score is beautiful, composed by Byung-Woo Lee, who also composed the music for the sublime Tale Of Two Sisters.
In short this is a quality production, clearly made with love. What prevents it from quite firing on all cylinders is the plot, which is a little predictable. Sinister children with dangerous powers are something of a staple of the science-fiction and horror genres, and anyone who’s seen or read a few such stories will be fairly confident about where this is headed. From the moment Eun-Soo sets foot in the fairy tale cottage where every day is Christmas Day and the decor makes your retinas bleed, our suspicions are roused. They’re all but confirmed by the behavior of the “parents”. Their rictus grins and desperate eyes scream that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. They handle their “son” as if he’s a box of sweaty gelignite and Continue reading BORDERLINE WEIRD: HANSEL AND GRETEL (2007)→
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![Still from Hour of the Wolf [Vargtimmen] (1968)](https://i0.wp.com/366weirdmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/hour_of_the_wolf.jpg?resize=450%2C278 "Hour of the Wolf")
