4/12/15 (Part Two): Framed to Fit Your Screen

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auteur theory, Bernat Vilaplana, cinema, cyber-terrorism, Elijah Wood, fame, fans, Film auteurs, films, films reviews, hackers, Jon D. Dominguez, Jorge Magaz, modern technology, Movies, Nacho Vigalondo, Neil Maskell, Open Windows, Sasha Grey, stalkers, stylish films, suspense, techno-thrillers, thrillers, Timecrimes, writer-director

As technology advances, so, too, has the way that we consume films. Gone are the days when “going to the movies” meant, literally, going out to see a movie: these days, audiences are just as likely to head into the living room and fire up the Roku as they are to drive to the multiplex when it comes to seeing new, first-run films. With video-on-demand offerings now equaling (and sometimes exceeding) what’s available in the theaters, to paraphrase the Bard, all the world’s on our computer screens and our Playstations are no longer merely players.

Few films have embraced this new era quite as ably, enthusiastically and downright entertainingly as Spanish auteur Nacho Vigalondo’s Open Windows (2014). Combining a complex, Hitchcockian plot with an appropriately glossy, techno-babble sheen, Vigalondo’s film takes place entirely within a series of on-screen computer windows. The result? One of the few films tailor-made for the way that many people will probably wind up watching it: an open window on their computer screen.

Wasting no time, we meet our erstwhile protagonist, Nick Chambers (Elijah Wood). He’s the earnest, clean-cut and rather nerdy webmaster of a fan site devoted to hot, young Hollywood “it-girl” Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey). Jill’s in the middle of a press junket for her newest soon-to-be-blockbuster, Dark Sky, a glowing-eyed-mutant epic that probably wouldn’t be out-of-place on a real-life multiplex marquee. Nick is pleased as punch because he’s just won a dinner date with Jill, a bit of happenstance that pretty much validates the entirety of his life.

Sweet turns to shit, however, when Nick gets a phone call from Chord (Neil Maskell), an employee with the company sponsoring Nick’s contest. Turns out that Jill has unceremoniously cancelled the event at the last minute, giving no reason and leaving Nick stranded without so much as a “how do ya do.” Nick is crushed but Chord offers him a bit of a band-aid: he hacks Nick into Jill’s personal electronic devices, giving the super-fan unprecedented access to entire life.

Declining to give in to Chord’s baser urging, Nick soon finds himself embroiled in a complex plan that seems to be spiraling ever faster and faster out of control. As Chord reveals himself to be less of a helpful perv and more of an evil genius, Nick must do everything he can to clear his own name, protect his beloved Jill and get to the bottom of the intricate game. He’ll have to be smart, however: Chord is brutal, ruthless and five steps ahead of him…one wrong move and it’s game over.

Despite coming off the rails in the final half hour, Open Windows is one of the most exhilarating, ingenious and flat-out fun films to come down the pike in quite some time. When the film is really firing on all cylinders, which is quite often, there’s a relentless sense of forward momentum that makes it all but impossible to blink, lest you miss some sort of background detail or bit of action. At times, the action is split between as many as 16 separate windows, making for the kind of dizzying “split-screen” action that ’60s cop shows could only dream about. It all works spectacularly well, maintaining a sense of cohesion that tiptoes the line between chaos and order but never slips into the abyss.

As someone who absolutely loved Vigalondo’s brilliant feature debut, Timecrimes (2007), I’ve eagerly awaited each new film with the kind of zeal normally reserved for children and cake. For my money, the writer-director is one of the smartest, freshest talents currently operating, a filmmaker who’s just one, big break away from becoming the next del Toro. While Open Windows isn’t quite that film, it is the kind of break-neck thriller that should move Nacho closer to that ever-present world domination.

Open Windows is a tricky film: similar to the way in which one might be rushed through a haunted house attraction, the audience is rushed through Vigalondo’s film, jerking to a halt only long enough to give the carriage a change to climb the rise and plummet down the next heart-stopping fall. It’s a setpiece-based film in that we are, essentially, watching bite-sized chunks of narrative played out before us in a multitude of various formats, each segment the equivalent of a video vignette we might peruse on Youtube. That the whole thing manages to come together into a complete whole (final thirty notwithstanding) is nothing short of a minor miracle. By its very nature, Open Windows is a film that should have been way too chaotic, disjointed, contrived and gimmicky to ever work: Vigalondo spins the various elements into pure gold.

While the film’s technical prowess and editing is duly impressive (cinematographer Jon D. Dominguez and editor Bernat Vilaplana deserve special mention for keeping everything as clear as they do), none of it would work without a sympathetic lead and Elijah Wood is more than up for the task. In the same way that Hitchcock had Stewart, Vigalondo uses Wood’s natural charisma and boyish Everymanism to keep our interest and sympathy fully on his side, even as the film twists and turns into some suitably dark places. Over the last few years, Wood has quietly become one of my very favorite actors, the kind of chameleonic performer who’s equally at home with the monstrosity of Maniac (2012) and the traditional heroism of Grand Piano. He’s the kind of performer who can draw me to a production on name alone and his work, here, is easily on par with his best. Between his work in genre films (I eagerly await his upcoming killer-kids film Cooties (2015)) and his production company, Elijah Wood is a bit of a modern genre hero and I, for one, salute him.

While Neil Maskell (incredibly fun as Banksy in Doghouse (2009)) makes a suitably sleazy villain, the real surprise is porn star-turned actress Grey. After making her “legitimate” film debut in Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience (2009), Grey would pop up in other film, from time to time, although Open Windows marks her biggest role since her debut. She’s quite good here: her fiery interview segment is an easy highlight and she manages to imbue Jill with the perfect mixture of aloof and vulnerable, an impossibly famous person who just wants to be invisible. While the majority of the film’s heavy lifting falls on Wood’s shoulders, Grey proves that she deserves more chances to show her dramatic chops.

For all of its numerous charms and positives, Open Windows is certainly not a perfect film: to be honest, it’s not even a better film than Vigalondo’s debut. Due to the necessary complexity of the storyline, credibility is eventually strained to the point where plot-holes became to rip through the surface with alarming frequency. There’s one point where Chord guides Nick from a hotel room into a car and onto the open road: it’s decidedly kickass but think about any one bit of it too long and the whole thing falls like bad souffle. The film also picks up speed to the point where plot elements blow by in the rearview mirror faster than one can register them.

When all is said and done, however, Open Windows is an undeniably good film. With astute observations on everything from the nature of modern fandom to the vagaries of internet fame to the difficulties of going “off the grid” in a world that’s perpetually connected, Vigalondo has plenty to say and this ends up being the perfect platform for him to say it. While I doubt that I’ll see another take quite as good as Vigalondo’s anytime soon (done poorly, I can only imagine that Open Windows would have been a kitschy, glitchy, head-inducing nightmare), this has definitely made me more receptive to this kind of thing in the future. While I’ll always be a fan of huge, sweeping cinema, Open Windows is proof that, sometimes, it’s just fine to watch something sized to fit your screen.

11/11/14: The Back of the Class

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Accion Mutante, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Alex de la Iglesia, Anna Massey, auteur theory, based on a book, Burn Gorman, cinema, co-writers, disappointing films, dramas, El dia de la bestia, Elijah Wood, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, grad students, Guillermo del Toro, Jim Carter, John Hurt, Jorge Guerricaechevarria, Julie Cox, Leonor Watling, mathematical formulas, Movies, murder-mystery, Oxford University, Perdita Durango, professor, Santa Sangre, The Day of the Beast, The Last Circus, The Oxford Murders, twist ending, Witching and Bitching, writer-director

Without a doubt, Spanish auteur Alex de la Iglesia is one of my very favorite filmmakers, a mischievous maestro who combines the surreal, magical-realism of Alejandro Jodorowsky with Guillermo del Toro’s affinity for genre material (and impish sense of humor). When de la Iglesia is good, he’s absolutely amazing: I would happily rank his most recent films, The Last Circus (2010), As Luck Would Have It (2011) and Witching and Bitching (2013) as some of the best films I’ve ever seen, which doesn’t even take into account his legendary ’90s output that features such cult classic (if impossible to find) treasures as Accion Mutante (1993), El dia de la Bestia (1995) and Perdita Durango (1997).

At his best, de la Iglesia is like a more accessible Jodorowsky, filling his films with delightfully bizarre little asides and eye-popping visual spectacles: in fact, I’ve always felt that The Last Circus was the best film that Jodorowsky never made, an impossibly beautiful yet horrifyingly grotesque political parable that can sit shoulder-to-shoulder with the classic Santa Sangre (1989). When he’s not scaling those impossible heights, de la Iglesia manages to turn out massively entertaining, endlessly pulpy genre films that usually involve tough women, lots of cars and guns and odd supernatural angles. Despite not having the pleasure of watching his entire back-catalog, I can honestly say that I never met a de la Iglesia film that I didn’t like…until I met The Oxford Murders (2008), that is. Despite an excellent cast and an appropriately twisty storyline, the film is largely an inert, confusing mess that displays barely a glimmer of de la Iglesia’s trademark bravura filmmaking. For the first time, to my chagrin, here was my hero treading water.

Our hero, Martin (Elijah Wood), is a grad student obsessed with the legendarily difficult, reclusive mathematician Arthur Seldom (John Hurt). Seeking to get a face-to-face meeting with the professor, Martin takes up lodging with his sister, Mrs. Eagleton (Anna Massey), and her moony-eyed daughter, Beth (Julie Cox). Disrupting one of Seldom’s lectures, Martin makes an ass out of himself, which makes things even more awkward when both he and Seldom end up back at Eagleton’s boarding house. They soon have something to talk about other than Martin’s bad manners, however, when they stumble upon the decidedly dead body of the land-lady.

A note found at the scene seems to indicate that Mrs. Eagleton was the victim of a serial killer, one who inscribes mathematical symbols like perfect circles onto his missives. Putting their heads together, Martin and Arthur realize that the killer is trying to play a game with the professor, a game that involves creating perfectly logical murders, all towards the goal of proving that they don’t exist. Confused yet? As Martin and Arthur rush from one new crime scene to the other, ably aided by Lorna (Leonor Watling), a young nurse who’s been intimate with both the grad student AND his elderly professor, they discover an intricate series of “almost-murders,” crimes committed in such ways as to seem almost natural…unless one knows what to look for, of course.

As the clock ticks down, the dynamic duo finds themselves in more and more danger, along with an increasing police presence that sees their continued appearance at the crime scenes as being a little too coincidental. Will they catch their culprit or will a mysterious maniac continue to wreak havoc in the hallowed halls of Oxford University?

There are lots of rather critical problems with The Oxford Murders but we’ll start with the biggest one: the film is both overly complicated and impossibly stupid, a critically lethal combo if ever there was one. In an attempt to seem Hitchcockian (an obvious source of inspiration), de la Iglesia piles one double-cross after another left-turn into further complications until the whole thing collapses into a soggy mess of plot contrivances. There are so many red herrings here (Martin’s batshit crazy roommate is an obvious one) that it kinds of feels like parody, after a while, as if de la Iglesia decided to take the piss out of old “drawing-room” mysteries for no perceptible reason.

Trying to follow the plot is no easy task but it’s made immeasurably more difficult by the film’s manic pace and propensity for over-the-top melodrama: Burn Gorman’s Yuri is one of the best examples of a character who not only makes no narrative sense but is pitched at such an insane level (he appears to be dubbed, which makes his bizarre speech patterns a little more understandable but just barely) that he seems to belong in another film. The bit where he makes an ass of himself at the party is a real “high” point but there isn’t much to his performance that could be deemed natural or, you know, non-hysterical.

Wood and Hurt, for their parts, are reliably sturdy, although they both end up just recycling previous performances as if re-wearing comfortable suits: Hurt is the cranky, sardonic old mentor, while Wood is the fish-out-of-water newbie just having his eyes opened to the real world. They’re performances that either actor could give in their sleep, to be honest, and bring nothing new to the table.

It’s not all a dreary disappointment, however: buried within the muck is one moment of pure, unadulterated de la Iglesia that’s an absolute joy to watch. After leaving Prof. Seldom’s lecture, Martin heads back to the boarding house and the camera heads along with him. In a simply glorious single take, the camera glides along after Martin but ends up “tagging” various other characters along the way, jumping from person to person like a giddy child before finally swooping into the boarding house to reveal Mrs. Eagleton’s dead body. Quite simply, it’s a wonderful scene: too bad it’s the only moment in the entire film that actually reminded me of de la Iglesia.

All in all, The Oxford Murders is a middle-of-the-road mystery hobbled by some truly over-the-top performances, a needlessly confusing plot and a truly stupid twist ending. Were any other filmmaker attached to this project, I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about the film, since I’ve seen way too many “competent” movies just like this. This is Alex de la Iglesia, however, a genuinely brilliant writer-director: there was no need for the film to be so completely tedious and anonymous. Luckily, de la Iglesia would follow-up The Oxford Murders with the aforementioned trilogy of The Last Circus, As Luck Would Have It and Witching and Bitching, handily proving that this was only a minor blip in an otherwise impeccable career. As it stands, The Oxford Murders should only be of interest to de la Iglesia completists: all others are advised to go straight to his classics and give this as wide a berth as possible.

6/23/14: Ol’ Hitch Would Be Proud

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Alex Winter, Alfred Hitchcock, Allen Leech, Best of 2013, cinema, classical music, Damien Chazelle, Dee Wallace, Don McManus, Elijah Wood, Eugenio Mira, favorite films, Film, film festival favorite, film reviews, Grand Piano, Hitchcock films, John Cusack, Kerry Bishe, Movies, mystery, pianist, piano, sniper, split-screen, suspense, Tamsin Egerton, thriller, Timecrimes, Tom Selznick

Whenever I think about suspense films, there’s always one name that’s on the tip of my brain: Alfred Hitchcock. It should go without saying that Hitchcock was one of the greatest directors to ever walk this planet, a master craftsman who was probably only equalled by fellow artisans like Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman. For my money, however, ol’ Hitch is also the greatest director of suspense films, hands down. Hitchcock films are perfectly wound, intricate clockwork puzzles, designed for maximum audience reaction and as close to perfect examples of sustained/released tension as I think it’s possible to create. His method of operation is best described by his famous example of the difference between “surprise” and suspense.” To paraphrase: if two people are sitting at a cafe table and suddenly blow up, that’s surprise…if the audience sees that there’s a bomb underneath the table but the characters don’t, however, that’s suspense. In one instance, you get the momentary shock of surprise, which is a fleeting rush. On the other hand, however, you can continue to build tension, dragging out the scene until the audience is practically screaming at the screen: this is a longer process and requires more patience but the payoff, ultimately, is that much greater. Hitchcock was practically peerless in letting audiences stew in their own juices.

Hitchcock, obviously, was a pretty one-of-a-kind filmmaker, a true auteur. Despite this indisputable fact, however, why would I begin a review of Eugenio Mira’s extraordinary new film, Grand Piano (2013), with a bunch of praise for an unrelated filmmaker who died when Mira was all of three years old? Regardless of how extraordinary I find Hitchcock to be, how much could he actually have to do with Mira’s film? Let’s put it this way: Hitchcock may not have had anything to do with Grand Piano but his fingerprints, style and sense of humor are all over the film. In many ways, Grand Piano is one of the very best films that ol’ Hitch never made, a meticulously crafted, unbelievably tense and remarkably plotted work of art that showcases a pair of actors at the top of their craft and gives audiences one completely unforgettable thrill ride. I’d heard good things about the film before going in but this was one situation where the hype should have been a whole lot louder.

Master pianist Tom Selznick (Elijah Wood) has come out of a five-year retirement in order to perform for a packed audience that includes his adoring, extremely famous actress spouse, Emma (Kerry Bishe). Tom quit the business after screwing up a complicated piece, humiliated by his public miscue. He’s here tonight, however, and playing his dead mentor’s priceless grand piano: the smell of redemption is in the air and Tom is feeling pretty great. As he turns the page on his sheet music, however, he comes across an ominous declaration, written in red across the page: “Play one wrong note and you die.” Subsequent notes lead him to understand that a mysterious sniper has both Tom and his wife in his sights and won’t hesitate to shoot them if Tom makes any mistakes. After being directed to grab an earpiece from his dressing room, Tom is finally in vocal contact with the mysterious man (John Cusack). The rules are simple: make one mistake, say one thing, try to attract attention in any way at all or disobey a single order…and Tom’s a dead man. But the show must go on: Tom’s audience may be captivated but he’s a captive and will do whatever it takes to get out.

Grand Piano takes an extremely simple, if ludicrous, premise (concert pianist held captive by sniper during live performance) and manages to turn it into one of the thorniest, wildest, most wonderful and flat-out impressive films I’ve ever seen. No joke: the film is an instant classic and, were it not for the prevalence and necessity of modern technology like cell phones, would seem almost timeless. Chalk that up to a few different things. On one hand, you have an outstanding lead duo with Elijah Wood and John Cusack: the two have more chemistry as adversaries than most romantic pairings I’ve seen lately. Wood has been on a bit of a career renaissance of late, with his performance in Franck Khalfoun’s outstanding Maniac (2012) being a particular highlight. His performance as Tom is just as good, although much more restrained (obviously). If anything, he definitely brought to mind the hassled heroism of someone like James Stewart, driving home that whole Hitchcock connection. Cusack has also been shying away from the roles that made him a mega-star in the ’80s and ’90s, becoming a bit of a brooding hero/anti-hero in film’s as diverse as Lee Daniels The Paperboy (2012), The Factory (2012), The Numbers Station (2013), Adult World (2013), The Frozen Ground (2013) and The Bag Man (2014). His performance as Clem is one of his very best “bad guy” roles, easily the equal of his work as the villainous Robert Hansen in The Frozen Ground. Cusack has the doubly-difficult task of being able to use only his voice for the vast majority of the film: it’s to his great credit that every slimy aspect of Clem comes through the earpiece loud and clear, without the benefits of body language or facial expression. Quite simply, Wood and Cusack are extraordinary in the film, each one so perfectly cast that it, again, reminds one of Hitchcock’s meticulous way with his actors.

Despite the film’s remarkably small, intimate set-up, it’s far from a two-man show. More than able support comes in the form of Kerry Bishe, whose Emma manages to seem fully actualized with a rather minimal amount of screentime. Also impressive are Tamsin Egerton, as Emma’s brash sister Ashley, and Alan Leech, as Ashley’s boyfriend Wayne. The duo add quite a bit of genuine humor to the film, as well as some surprising pathos, later on. They aren’t big roles, by any stretch of the term, but they are exceptionally important roles: there are no throwaway pieces in Mira’s intricate jigsaw puzzle of a film. Every actor, just like every camera angle and line of dialogue, is perfectly calibrated to offer maximum impact. One of the neatest touches? Bill and Ted’s Alex Winters as the assistant. As always, it makes me wish he acted more often, since it’s a perfectly nuanced performance. Even a seemingly disposable role like the janitor who shakes his head disapprovingly at Tom is given considerable class when played by a veteran character actor like Jim Arnold: it’s a great touch that really speaks to a rock-solid cast.

Not only is Grand Piano exquisitely cast, however, but it’s immaculately crafted, possessing some truly gorgeous cinematography and an excellent sound design that seems tailor-made for amps that go to 11. I’ve driven home the Hitchcock references time and time again but I’ll hammer it one more time: quite simply, Grand Piano looks like one of Hitchcock’s classic films. There’s a richness of image and color, a vibrancy and life that instantly recalls the Golden Age of Hollywood. As enamored as I was with the story, it would have been impossible to tear my eyes from the screen, regardless, thanks to how great everything looked. There’s one moment in the film where a shot organically becomes a split screen: I’m not quite sure how it’s done but I do know that it’s audacious, eye-catching and completely badass. It’s the kind of moment that makes films so much fun and Grand Piano is full of them.

Truth be told, Grand Piano really knocked my socks off. By the time the film revs up to full speed, it’s absolutely unstoppable, one fist-raising moment after another. It’s no hyperbole to say that I was on the edge of my seat the whole time because I literally was: it would have been impossible for me to sit back if I tried. Like the best of Hitchcock’s films, Grand Piano is imminently watchable, a 90 minute thrill-ride that feels like 45. Not only is Grand Piano tense and thrilling, however, but it’s also whip-smart: this is not the typical “dumb people do dumb things to advance the plot” film. This is much closer to an intricately plotted heist film, where every little detail and tidbit is part of the scheme, every throw-away factoid is actually a clue to the bigger picture. Regardless of how initially ridiculous any one set-piece in Grand Piano is (and there are some real corkers, let me tell ya), the movie handles everything with such a consistent sense of intelligence and rationality that I was inclined to believe all of it: why not?

I’ve tried to be as purposefully vague with plot details as possible so as to preserve as many of the film’s genuine surprises as I can: this is a film that will surprise you, time and again, so the less known, the better. The only things that you really need to know are that Grand Piano is an astounding film, Eugenio Mira is absolutely a director to keep an eye on and that you’re pretty much guaranteed to have a blast while watching. I don’t pretend to speak for Alfred Hitchcock in any way, shape or form but I’m pretty sure that Hitch would give this his seal of approval. At the very least, he’d take one look at Eugenio Mira and say, “Now there’s a man who understands the difference between surprise and suspense.”

6/10/14 (Part One): The Men Who Make the Nightmares

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behind-the-scenes, blood-button effect, Bob Kurtzman, Day of the Dead, Dick Smith, documentaries, documentary, Donna Davies, Elijah Wood, Frank Darabont, George Romero, golden age of special effects, Greg Nicotero, Gross Anatomy, Howard Berger, Jack Pierce, John Carpenter, John Landis, KNB Effects, Kurtzman, Lon Chaney, Nightmare Factory, practical effects, Quentin Tarantino, Ray Harryhausen, Rick Baker, Robert Kirkman, Robert Kurtzman, Robert Rodriguez, Sam Raimi, special effects, special effects pioneer, Tom Savini, visual effects, writer-director-producer

When one is discussing the most influential special effects/make-up/visual effects artists in the business, there are a few names that always seem to come up: Tom Savini…Rick Baker…Stan Winston…Ray Harryhausen (RIP). Look closely, however, and you’ll notice another trio of names that seem to pop up in every other end credit scroll for the past several decades: Greg Nicotero, Howard Berger and Bob Kurtzman. Although they have plenty of individual credits to their name, the three would go on to form KNB Effects, one of the most influential and omnipresent effects studios to emerge since Lucas’ groundbreaking Industrial Light and Magic. Donna Davies’ fun and informative documentary, Nightmare Factory, takes an up-close-and-personal look at KNB Effects, with particular emphasis on co-founder Greg Nicotero, sfx godfather Tom Savini’s protegé.

Kicking off with a “greatest-hits” highlight reel that amounts to a fan-pleasing gore clip show (complete with pounding metal soundtrack), Nightmare Factory makes one thing abundantly clear: this one is aimed right at the genre fans who geek out on fantastic monsters, severed limbs, spurting blood, explosions and puppetry. We go through the history of KNB, which begins with the history of its key players: Greg Nicotero, Howard Berger and Bob Kurtzman. While we don’t get a whole lot of Kurtzman, who left the company a decade into its existence, we do get a whole lot of Nicotero and quite a bit of Berger. Luckily, Nicotero is an absolutely fascinating person, a life-long film and genre fan who’s devoted his entire life to making the impossible real. Long before KNB Effects was a twinkle in anyone’s eye, Nicotero and his younger brother, Bryan, were making their own movies, perfecting stunts, devising effects and props and, in general, being pretty amazing. A chance encounter with George Romero (during a family vacation in Rome, no less) led the 16-year-old Greg to a tour of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) shopping mall set and an offer to work on his next film, Day of the Dead (1985). This, in turn, led to Nicotero meeting effects god Tom Savini and the rest, as they say, is history.

After meeting and becoming friends on the set of Day of the Dead, Nicotero and Berger ended up moving in with a friend of Berger’s named Robert Kurtzman. The three became fast friends on the set of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 (1987) which led to the realization that they might be able to make something bigger of this. KNB Effects was born and, within short order, became a powerhouse in the world of movie special effects, particularly in the effects-heavy era of the late-’80s and early-’90s. KNB Effects reach was so widespread, in fact, that it extended to decidedly non-genre offerings like Gross Anatomy (1989) and Oscar-winner Dances with Wolves (1990). In fact, you’d be pretty hard-pressed to find a film with any kind of practical effect within the past 30 years that didn’t bear the mark of either KNB Effects, Nicotero, Berger or Kurtzman: the guys were just that ubiquitous in the industry! Some of the best parts of the film involve the footage of KNB Effects heyday in the late ’80s, where the studio had a wild, rock ‘n roll, party-hard attitude: most of the effects artists were also in rock bands, hung out together constantly, partied the night away and made monsters during the daytime. For a guy like me, this looked like pretty much the best place to work in the entire world. Fuck crazy Wall Street firms: the shenanigans at KNB looked like a whole lot more fun!

Although KNB Effects is just about as important as effect studios get (they even created the “blood-button” effect that has allowed generations of indie filmmakers to create gunshots on the cheap), the times are always changing and we feel the effects of this within the doc. Studios now want effects as quickly and cheaply as possible: there’s no longer time to lovingly craft effects in the same way that the artisans did twenty years before. While computer-generated imagery is a valuable tool when used hand-in-hand with practical effects, the tendency these days is to heavily rely on CGI, which can be much quicker and cheaper to utilize than practical effects but tends to have a disarmingly glossy hyper-reality that is no patch on the oftentimes rougher practical effects of bygone eras. It’s certainly a devil’s dilemma: filmmakers are always in a desperate need to save money, which makes CGI the only feasible reality for many low-budget productions, yet cheap CGI makes any film look bad, regardless of the general quality of the production.

There’s also the sad revelation, late in the film, that Nicotero doesn’t really think anyone will come around to replace them: no one has a burning desire to just make monsters these days, he says, at least not like in the days of Famous Monsters of Film Land, Ray Harryhausen and Tom Savini (at 68, Savini is now the elder statesman who used to be the infant terrible…he even has his own special effects training school). We do get to see a few members of the younger generation who were influenced by the ’70s-’80s pioneers, such as Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Robert Rodriguez, although we don’t really get to meet any of the new generation to whom Nicotero and the others will be passing their torch.

While Nicotero certainly has a history and perspective on the situation that I’ll never possess, I can’t help but feel that he’s dead wrong in that aspect: there will always be kids around who want to make monsters. As long as there are geeky outsiders who spend their childhoods reading monster magazines under the blankets, there will be special effects people. As long as there are kids who create backyard zombie epics featuring the contents of their fridge and an ocean of passion, there will be special effects people. We may very well come to a time when practical effects are no longer utilized in mainstream cinema, where CGI has become the all-encompassing cinematic creative force and where model-makers are as quaint as town criers. Hell, we may already be there. As long as there are still kids who grow up with the burning desire to make the magic themselves, however, to mold the clay and set the fuses and paint the models, to bring life to dead objects in the same way that Dr. Frankenstein once did…as long as these kids are still around, there will always be someone to carry on the flag. Nightmare Factory serves as a wonderful reminder of just what an important tradition this really is and a truly loving salute to those who continue to keep the tradition alive.