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Capsules

ALL THE HAUNTS BE OURS: A COMPENDIUM OF FOLK HORROR, VOLUME 2

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Severin Films. 13 disc set.

Severin Films continues their groundbreaking folk-horror “college course in a box” set with the second semester. Expanding and exploring on themes and offering more selections to discover and debate, this time around it has 24 features representing 18 countries, along with tons of extras. Acknowledging the literary roots of the genre, Vol. 2 also comes with a 250 page book, “A Folk Horror Storybook,” a collection of 12 short stories by noted writers in the genre—Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman, Cassandra Khaw amongst them—with an introduction by Kier-La Janisse, who returns as producer/curator of the whole shebang. The “expansion of themes” may cause some to feel cheated, as there are only a handful of films that fit the expected parameters of “horror” here. But that objection may be more of a failing of the viewer. There are elements of the frightful in all of the selections, and although perhaps  “uncanny” or “spectral” would be better terms, “horror” makes for a good umbrella.

Still from To Fire You Come At Last (2023)
To Fire You Come At Last

Disc 1 features the UK with a film by writer Sean (“England’s Screaming”) Hogan, To Fire You Come At Last (2023), a knowing homage to BBC shows like “Dead of Night” and “Ghost Stories For Christmas.” Four men carry a coffin to a graveyard along a “corpse road” and encounter dangers: from each other, and from something else. Bonus features include commentary by Hogan and producers, along with an earlier short by Hogan, “We Always Find Ourselves In The Sea,” also with commentary, and a separate featurette on corpse roads.

Paired with To Fire is Psychomania, a 1973 B-movie by Don Sharp involving juvenile delinquent bikers whose leader (Nicky Henson from Witchfinder General) learns the secret of returning from the dead—and promptly does it! He then starts recruiting the other members to follow suit. There’s witchery/devil/frog worship, George Sanders (in his last role), a sappy ballad, and lots of cycle action, making for some fine British cheese. This was a previous Severin release with featurettes about the actors and music, all which have been ported over, along with a new commentary by Hellebore Magazine editor Maria J. Perez Cuervo and a new short documentary on stone circles and standing stones.

Disc 2 focuses on two American features: The Enchanted (1984) with Julius Harris and Larry Miller (acting under the name Will Sennet), directed by Carter Lord, and 1973’s Who Fears The Devil? (AKA The Legend of Hillbilly John), with Hedges Capers and Severn Darden, directed by John Newland. Based on a story by Elizabeth Coatsworth, Continue reading ALL THE HAUNTS BE OURS: A COMPENDIUM OF FOLK HORROR, VOLUME 2 →

Capsules

2024 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: AND THE REST, PART ONE

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Montréal 2024

Walking through a downtown department store my first day, I overheard a fellow say to his wife, “They have some more over here, eh?”, referring to a rack of fanny packs.

It will only get less Canadian from here.

7/18: 4PM

I recently stumbled across an unexpected “horror-of-manners“.  I also was not expecting a “tragedy-of-manners” (one which slips into “thriller-of-manners” on occasion) which unfolds with the breezy charm of a Dupieux picture—and here I mean, a Buñuel picture.

4PM is the most boring festival title this year, and appropriately it focuses on a boring man: a cardiologist by trade, who takes to visiting his new neighbors (a professor on sabbatical, and his wife) every day at… 4 o’clock. Sitting, sitting, sitting, and saying virtually nothing. Promptly at 6, he rises, gathers his coat, and wordlessly leaves the premises. The professor and wife alternately marvel, cringe, fear, and laugh at the phenomenon; and then details regarding their unlikely guest begin to emerge. Jay Song’s film delights and saddens, ending with a crushing act of vengeance.

7/19: The A-Frame

has assembled an interesting “hard” science-fiction film with some poignancy, featuring a just-annoyed-enough protagonist with bone cancer, a just-tough-but-caring-enough support character surviving cancer, and a just-sketchy-enough quantum physicist who has discovered, quite by accident, a cure for cancer. (Oh, and lest I forget Rishi, there’s also a just-sad-sack-enough comedian with cancer, facing his travails with an admirable flippancy and an endless line of bad-but-good jokes.) The A-Frame is a solidly B-movie experience, with neat-o machinery, touching moments, and commendable practical effects.

Vulcanizadora

The latest from Joel Potrykus begins as a buddy comedy: a buddy comedy with opera and metal. Two guys walk resolutely down a country road along the woodland edge, and with a sudden drop of the hardcore Continue reading 2024 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: AND THE REST, PART ONE →

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CITIZEN DOG (2004)

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Mah Nakorn

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Wisit Sasanatieng

FEATURING: Mahasamut Boonyaruk, Saengthong Gate-Uthong

PLOT: Pod moves to Bangkok, despite his grandmother’s warning he will grow a tail if he does so, and falls in love with Jin, a woman of serial obsessions—none of which involve Pod.

Still from Citizen Dog (2004)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: It begins with Pod losing his finger at his sardine-canning job (he gets it back later). It ends on a mountain of plastic bottles that dominates the Bangkok skyline. In between, it indulges in a subplot about an affair between a girl who’s either 8 or 22 years old and her talking teddy bear. Oh, and it’s also intermittently a musical. Citizen Dog takes a lot of lunatic swings, and still manages to remain a crowd-pleasing romance.

COMMENTS: Pod and Jin are each, in their own way, searching for a dream, while not realizing that they are living in one. Jin dreams of one day reading the book that fell out of the sky and landed on her deck, written in a language unknown to her; later, she is able to put that dream to one side to pursue an obsession with saving the planet via recycling. Pod, meanwhile, is introduced to us as “a man without a dream”—at least, until he encounters Jin and quickly falls in love. Jin drifts from dream to dream, risking devastation when her plans don’t turn out as she expects, while Pod drifts from job to job, too scared to commit to anything and declare his feelings. Meanwhile, both of them miss the magic of the world around them.

The viewer doesn’t make that mistake, however. Wisit Sasanatieng drenches his movie in some of the boldest color schemes ever ladled on the big screen. Pod leaves a country home where swaths of golden grass grow from russet dirt, waving against a painted backdrop sky with an eternally glowing sun, and lands in a busy Bangkok where he gets a job at a ruby and emerald colored sardine-processing factory where even the fish have pink eyes. The people who populate the city are even stranger than their visual environments: a zombie taxi driver, killed during one of the city’s periodic rains of helmets; an amnesiac obsessed with licking; a talking teddy bear, who’s also a chain smoker who falls on hard times and turns homeless. Don’t worry, there are plenty more crazy characters where those came from, along with breaks for musical numbers, sequences that are sped-up or which play out in lethargic slow motion, and a gecko sex scene. Citizen Dog never runs out of ideas to throw at the viewer; but for Pod and Jin, it’s all just part of everyday life in the big city.

In conventional terms, Citizen Dog fails as a romantic comedy, because it never convincingly shows how Pod wins Jin’s heart. Dreamy Jin is completely blind to Pod’s devotion up into the final scene, when she suddenly succumbs to a short sappy speech and a kiss. But who cares? In unconventional terms, the movie succeeds brilliantly; each part of the series of almost-unconnected vignettes is a miniature joke brilliant enough to keep you eagerly awaiting the next one, so that you don’t really notice (or care much) about Jin’s lack of romantic development.

Citizen Dog‘s blend of old-fashioned romance and digitally-enhanced surrealism often draws comparisons to Amelie (2001). Tonally, however, it more resembles ‘s Mood Indigo (2013), in that it creates a whimsically unreal but fully lived-in universe where absolutely anything can happen. The difference is that Citizen Dog remains lighthearted to the end, never succumbing to the darkness that envelops the moody Indigo.

The genesis of Citizen Dog is as odd as its story line. It’s an adaptation of a novel by Koynuch. But, in a twist, Koynuch’s novel was itself an adaptation of Sasanatieng’s original unpublished screenplay! Once Koynuch gave Sasanatieng’s collection of vignettes without a story a unifying theme of dreams, the director felt he could come back to the script he’d abandoned and turn it into a feature film.

Sasanatieng’s first movie, Tears of the Black Tiger, was a Spaghetti Western parody with vividly artificial visuals similar to Citizen Dog. Both movies were minor hits with film-festival followers, although Dog is the more accessible of the two. But none of Sasanatieng’s subsequent movies have made much headway in the West, although he is still active. Unfortunately, Citizen Dog is not currently available on home video or (although you might be able to find a used all-region DVD on Ebay or other sources—be cure to confirm English subtitles are included). Tears of the Black Tiger, on the other hand, is still easy to acquire.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“People are able to swap fingers, they can grow tails, teddy bears are able to talk and sometimes it rains helmets. And that’s just a small selection of the weirdness this films throws at you. None of these things are ever properly explained, they’re just a part of the surreal world the characters inhabit and have to deal with on a daily basis.”–Niels Matthijs, Screen Anarchy

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

Capsules

CAPSULE: CEMETERY OF SPLENDOR (2015)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Banlop Lomnoi, Jarinpattra Rueangram

PLOT: Soldiers struck with an inexplicable sleeping sickness are housed at an old school, and a housewife volunteer develops an empathic bond with one young victim, which may involve entering his dreams.

Still from Cemetery of Splendor (2015)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Fans of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (who mercifully nicknamed himself “Joe” for the benefit of Western audiences) know exactly what to expect from his latest experiment in dream cinema: long takes, quiet moods, the blurring of the line between the real and unreal, and mundane dramatics that subtly slip into the surreal. Cemetery will please those he’s already won over, but his Palme d’Or winning breakthrough Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives makes for a better representative of his sleepy, spiritually weird style. We wouldn’t rule out adding another of Joe’s movies to the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies down the road, but it will need to venture farther into the bizarre than Cemetery does.

COMMENTS: With four minutes of nearly silent establishing shots—showing sleeping soldiers being shipped by the truckload to the makeshift hospital, and our limping protagonist making her way up the wooden planks of the porch on her way to volunteer duty—Weerasethakul throws down the gauntlet to viewers’s attention spans. This introduction is followed by an initial half-hour that seems composed mostly of long and medium shots of young men sleeping, with middle-aged women quietly sitting by their bedsides watching over them, and a lunch break to introduce the fact that one of them has psychic abilities. (We also, for reasons only Joe could explain, watch a man poop in the woods).

The movie, set in a leafy Thai jungle and scored to the hum of insects and distant rumbling backhoes, lulls us into a peaceful mood. We might be forgiven for wondering if we have fallen asleep ourselves and are dreaming when things start to change. Does the soldier Jen watches over, Itt, briefly wake up and take a meal with her? Maybe, maybe not, but surely two dead princess don’t visit her at a picnic table at the dinosaur park to share fruit and explain a possible origin of the sleeping sickness. And we might doubt that the psychic licks Jen’s deformed leg as a form of therapy. And when amoebas appear drifting among the clouds in the sky, you can be absolutely sure it’s a dream.

Cemetery of Splendor never goes anywhere, so there’s nothing to wrap up. The soldiers, and their caretakers, simply sleep and dream on, and at some point Weerasethakul decides to turn the camera off. A paradoxical offering from a Valium-toned auteur, Cemetery of Splendor is simultaneously minor and profound, inconclusive and whole. It’s a film you’re proud to have seen, but in no rush to watch again.

For those not yet ready to wake up, the 2016 Strand DVD includes a “making of” featurette and deleted scenes.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[Weerasethakul’a] movies work best when they’re washing over you, even when — in fact, especially when — things get weird.”–Matt Prigge, Metro