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List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE VOICES (2014) [PLUS “7TH DAY” AND “ENTER THE DANGEROUS MIND”]

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Gemma Arterton, , Jacki Weaver, Ella Smith

PLOT: A likable schizophrenic struggles to corner reality when he accidentally kills the object of his affections after going off his meds.

THE VOICES
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  The Voices is comic in the black style of Blood Diner (1987), yet unexpectedly hits us with grim, sometimes even poignant, perspectives—then throws us curve balls, such as when the movie bursts into a stylized dance number to represent a character’s transition to the afterlife.

COMMENTS: There’s no shortage of movies about crazy guys who murder women. While I like graphic horror, the violence has to further the plot and the plot has to either make me think, or grandly entertain me. In cinema, the torturing of helpless people presented as a spectacle to make up for a poor story line is sick and boring. That said, three recent and overlooked independent movies about crazy guys murdering women have caught my attention as standout works! These films are similar in that in each of them, the killer is the protagonist, and the character-study plots attempt to show us what’s going on inside his head and why.

In these three stories the slayers are vulnerable and delusional in ways that almost make us excuse their actions. Each misguidedly pursues, and us rejected by, an idealized love interest. Each strives to lead a normal life, but keeps tripping over his own mental illness. In all three films, the murderer is schizophrenic who rationalizes his thoughts and actions to, or is advised by, an imaginary confidant. Each entry in this demented trio of serial killer flicks effectively pulls off this fictitious friend gimmick, which not only adds and extra dimension to their respective stories, but oddly—and unsettlingly—compels a twisted sort of empathy for the homicidal central characters.

Still from Enter the Dangerous Mind (2013)In director Victor Teran’s Enter the Dangerous Mind (2013), featuring Scott Bakula and Jason Priestley, Jim (Jake Hoffman), is an aspiring electronic music composer who goes completely insane. It’s a serious film, and Jim has serious issues with the opposite sex. His low self-esteem and the near perpetual berating he receives over his ineptitude with girls compounds his emotional baggage. The admonishment and abuse comes from Jim’s caustic imaginary roommate. Rejection by his love interest leads to paranoia, exacerbated by the ever escalating timbre of a strange and terrible chorus of discordant sounds in Mark’s head; disembodied voices mixed with the maddening phonic trappings of our total-immersion electronic media culture.

7th Day (2012) is a gritty, low-budget but well-produced effort authored by Mark Leake, the writer/director of the -esque cannibal exploitation film parodies Isle (2008) and Pleasures of the Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: THE VOICES (2014) [PLUS “7TH DAY” AND “ENTER THE DANGEROUS MIND”] →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE NINES (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: John August

FEATURING: , ,, Hope Davis, Elle Fanning

PLOT: Three separate plot strands—about a self-destructive actor under house arrest, a writer trying to get his series past the pilot stage while being filmed by a reality TV crew, and a video game designer whose car breaks down in the middle of nowhere—intertwine in a mysterious way, with the same actors playing different characters in each mini-story.

Still from The Nines (2007)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Any doubts I might have had about considering this pretty good, pretty strange movie as a candidate for the List were allayed when I heard writer/director John August proclaim “we’re a weird movie, for a lot of reasons…” on the “making of” DVD featurette.  If the director deliberately set out to make a weird movie, who am I to refuse to consider it?  But, while August’s movie scores above average in terms of both quality and of weirdness, I’m not sure that it’s combined totals are high enough to inaugurate it as one of the greatest weird movies of all time, at least not on the first ballot.

COMMENTS: I have to be careful in discussing The Nines not to give away much more than you’d discover on your own by reading the blurb on the back of the DVD case.  When you pop the disc into your player, you can expect to see three different stories—“The Prisoner,” “Reality Television,” and “Knowing”—acted by the same core trio, each playing different roles in each tale.  Besides the actors, locales, song lyrics, a television series, and—especially—the number “9” recur in each of the divergent plot lines, drawing correspondences and reverberances between these various worlds.  There is a thread connecting each strand; and although the first two stories, at least, are engaging on their own terms, it’s figuring out that overarching plan that supplies most of the interest.  One thing that can be discussed (and praised) without spoiling anything is the acting.  Hope Davis plays, variously, a horny housewife, a conniving TV producer, and a hiker in the middle of nowhere; Melissa McCarthy tackles the triumvirate of a bubbly public relations expert, the mother of a mute girl, and herself, the “Gilmore Girls” actress.  But it’s previously unheralded Ryan Reynolds who’s the real revelation here.  As a dimwitted, Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: THE NINES (2007) →