12/22/14 (Part One): Tie Your Mother Down

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Adam Robitel, alternate title, Alzheimer's Disease, Anne Bedian, Anne Ramsay, Brett Gentile, children in peril, cinema, co-writers, Deborah Logan, evil old lady, feature-film debut, film crews, film reviews, films, found-footage films, horror, horror films, immortality, Jeremy DeCarlos, Jill Larson, Julianne Taylor, Michelle Ang, mockumentary, mother-daughter relationships, Movies, murdered children, Paranormal Activity, possession, pseudo-documentary, Ryan Cutrona, serial killers, snakes, The Blair Witch Project, The Taking, The Taking of Deborah Logan, titular characters, Tonya Bludsworth, writer-director-editor

Anyone who’s ever watched a loved one succumb to Alzheimer’s knows that the disease is a true monster that rivals anything the brightest stars in horror can dream up: formerly brilliant minds revert to a state of petulant childhood, life-long lovers forget the partner who’s been by their side for decades and, eventually, the victim’s body betrays its own basic functions and forgets such prime directives as “Eat” and “Breathe.” The deepest, most enduring tragedy of the disease is the way it makes the familiar alien to us: when all that we ever really carry with us is our memories, Alzheimer’s ends up being the most lethal, insidious thief of all.

Despite the inherently horrifying nature of the disease, cinematic depictions of Alzheimer’s are almost always delivered as tear-jerking dramas, stories of families in crisis, bittersweet ruminations on life-long love running its course, etc…Thanks to writer-director Adam Robitel, however, the world of cinematic horror finally has its first “Alzheimer’s disease”-related film: The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014) is a found-footage film that purports to examine someone suffering from the effects of Alzheimer’s who may also (or may not) be suffering from some sort of demonic possession. While the film’s angle is pretty unique and the first half manages to offer up some nicely subtle chills, however, Robitel’s feature-length debut winds up collapsing into a mess of lazy Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007) clichés by its final act, squandering much of the good will that the film earns along the way. Nonetheless, The Taking of Deborah Logan certainly earns points for finding a more unique subject to exploit” than the same moldy old haunted house/moving furniture tropes that have been de rigueur in found-footage for the past 15 years or so.

Right off the bat, we’re greeted with text that explains that the film we’re about to see has been cobbled together from various footage sources and has been “lightly” edited and spruced-up: a vague bit of base-covering that, essentially, gives a pass for any and all unexplained angles, non-digetic sounds, etc…that we’ll be encountering. It’s also, by its very nature, a rather lazy approach to the format and the first (of many) warning signs that this particular way will be a rocky one. In a nutshell, medical student Mia (Michelle Ang), along with crew members Gavin (Brett Gentile) and Luis (Jeremy DeCarlos), wants to make a documentary about Alzheimer’s patient Deborah Logan (Jill Larson). Deborah’s grown daughter, Sarah (Anne Ramsay), is eager to get the filmmakers involved, since they’ve offered to help pay for her mother’s increasingly expensive medical care. When the formerly on-board Deborah suddenly decides that she values her privacy more than the assistance, however, all signs point to Mia’s documentary being D.O.A.

There wouldn’t, of course, be a movie without a change of heart, however, the crew are invited back a week later to begin filming their project. At first, everything seems pretty normal: Deborah is certainly more forgetful than the average person but there doesn’t seem to be anything too terrible going on. In short order, however, we see just how fast Deborah is stuck in the sticky web that is Alzheimer’s: she begins to forget basic things about her own daughter and past, has mood changes on a moment’s notice and has started to let her own hygiene slide. As Sarah tries to help her mother retain as much of her personality as she can, we witness the heartbreaking ways in the disease breaks down both its victim and her caregiver: as Mia notes in one of her documentaries many talking points, caring for an Alzheimer victim can alter the caregiver’s brain chemistry, as well, making the terrible disease a truly lose-lose proposition.

Just when it seems as if The Taking of Deborah Logan might be the world’s first found-footage-styled “after-school special,” however, things begin to take a turn for the sinister. Cameraman Gavin happens to spy Deborah doing some odd things with a snake and the older woman seems to develop a habit of appearing right behind folks, scaring the everlovin’ shit out of them. Things really come to a head, however, when Deborah completely flips out and accuses Gavin of stealing her beloved garden trowel: she chases him around the kitchen with a large butcher knife, cornering him on the counter and very nearly costs everyone involved several fingers. After taking her back to the hospital and the kindly Dr. Nazir (Anne Bedian), Sarah gets the worst news possible: her mother’s condition is deteriorating at an ever more rapid rate and she’s losing more of her brain on a daily basis. The end, as Sarah knows all to well, may be over the next horizon but it’s getting closer by the minute.

Deborah’s condition may be terrible but Mia and the others begin to notice a frightening pattern: Alzheimer’s explains some, but not all, of the things that are happening around them. Snakes start popping up everywhere, Deborah has taking to painting a series of pictures which depict a mysterious, black figure moving ever closer to their house and she’s developed an alarming propensity for what medical experts must surely dub “scary, intense and gravely demon voices” (take two pills twice a day, as needed). After a truly creepy incident involving Deborah’s patented in-home switchboard system, Mia and the others come to think that someone else might be responsible for Deborah’s more violent tendencies: specifically, they come to believe that poor Deborah is possessed by the spirit of serial killer Henry Desjardins (Kevin A. Campbell), a pediatrician who mysteriously disappeared after killing four children as part of an immortality ceremony.

As Deborah’s behavior becomes more and more extreme, Sarah is truly backed-up against a wall: she could barely care for her mother before creepy paranormal shit started happening and this all just seems like one cruel cosmic joke, especially when everyone from the local priest to the college’s expert in anthropological studies seems unable to give her any assistance. Is Deborah actually possessed by the spirit of an insane killer or is her Alzheimer’s just getting exponentially worse as time goes on? What’s up with all of the snakes that seem to be popping up everywhere? Could there be another, darker, mystery at the heart of everything…a mystery that could potentially unravel our comfortable belief in a rational world and give us a front-seat to our own demise? What is actually taking Deborah Logan: an unstoppable disease or pure evil?

For roughly the first half of the film, The Taking of Deborah Logan is a really well made found-footage film, albeit one that doesn’t do much new with the sub-genre, aside from the subject matter. That being said, the early found footage aspect of Robitel’s film is quite strong: in particular, I really liked the pseudo-documentary aspects of Mia’s film, such as the computer-aided infographics, actor reenactments and talking head interviews. Unlike other found-footage films that aim for a pseudo-doc feel, The Taking of Deborah Logan actually feels like the real thing: kudos to Robitel for managing to nail the tone/look so spot-on.

The acting is also quite good across the first few acts, with Jill Larson turning in a massively impressive performance as the titular character: her ability to vacillate between sweet, angry, forgetful and prideful is absolutely essential to the success of the character and Larson pulls it off quite handily. There are moments in The Taking of Deborah Logan that are absolutely heart-breaking and it’s all down to Larson’s incredibly subtle, expressive performance. Once she gets more bonkers in the latter half of the film, her performance begins to seem a bit more heavy-handed but the early going is quite masterful.

If only the same could be said of Anne Ramsay’s performance as Sarah, however. Ramsay comes into the film “turned up to 11,” as it were, and her performance only gets more strident as the film wears on. By the climax, both Sarah and Mia are so shrill, giddy and obnoxious that I spent the final 15 minutes secretly hoping something would bump off both their characters, a pretty extreme switch from rooting for them a mere 20 minutes before that. Ditto for Gentile and DeCarlos’ unlikable turns as Mia’s film crew: neither character ever gets more to do than utter tired variations on “Oh, hell no!” and the script saddles DeCarlos with one of the awful “these crazy white people” asides that’s a real head-smacker. I’m also not sure what’s going on with Ryan Cutrona’s performance as next-door-neighbor Harris: not only did he never really seem to factor into the story, his motivations and personality also seemed to change on the drop of a hat, based on whatever the script needed him to do…nothing quite like a character who might as well be named “Johnny Plot Contrivance.”

As mentioned earlier, the subtle, sparse quality of The Taking of Deborah Logan’s first 40 minutes ends up getting thrown completely out the window in the last half of the film, resulting in endless scenes where characters look through a camera viewfinder while running down endless, anonymous dark tunnels, as well as those now ubiquitous “stationary cameras recording while everyone sleeps” clichés that seemed to spring fully formed from Paranormal Activity like Athena busting out of Zeus’ cranium. None of it adds anything new to the format whatsoever and the film even manages to end with one of those moldy “or are they…evil?” “twists” that’s probably only novel for folks that have been in comas for the past several decades.

Despite how disappointing the film becomes, however, there’s plenty to like here, including a thoroughly gonzo, kickass scene during the climax that involves one of the characters spitting acidic venom and distending their jaw like a snake in order to swallow someone whole: suffice to say that my resulting upraised fist probably knocked a big chunk of cheese out of the moon. On the whole, however, The Taking of Deborah Logan ends up being just another found-footage film, full of all of the same problems and clichés, albeit with slightly more imagination and invention, than the rest of the unwashed masses. There was enough solid material here to make Robitel’s film easy to recommend, even if the film will always function best as one of the “rainy day” viewings. Nonetheless, give Robitel and co-writer Gavin Heffernan credit for one thing: they have to be the first filmmakers to plant a horror flag in the desolate wasteland that is Alzheimer’s Disease and that, on its own, has to be worth something.

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6/29/14 (Part One): What a Buncha Bloodsuckers

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Batiste Sornin, Belgian films, Carlo Ferrante, co-writers, Dracula, exiles, film crews, flashbacks, Fleur Lise Heuet, foreign films, found-footage, horror-comedies, independent film crew, Julien Dore, Pierre Lognay, satires, Selma Alaoui, Vampire Code of Conduct, vampires, vampires vs humans, Vera van Dooren, Vincent Lannoo, writer-director

By this point in the 2010s, it seems that we’ve seen every permutation of vampire in films that we possible could: we’ve had the vampire as tragic Byronic figure [Dracula (1931 and 1992), Interview With the Vampire (1994)], rat-like monstrosity [Nosferatu (1922), 30 Days of Night (2007)], bumbling idiot [Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)], moony-eyed, sparkly teenager [Twilight (2008)], swinging ’70s hipster [Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), Dracula AD 1972 (1972] and even action-hero [Blade (1998)]. We’ve seen black vampires [Blacula (1972), Scream, Blacula Scream (1973)], female vampires [Queen of Blood (1966), Lady Dracula (1977)] and even non-vampires acting in decidedly vampiric ways [The Last Man on Earth (1964), Martin (1978)]. At this point, are there any vampires we haven’t seen?

Turns out we haven’t seen Belgian vampires yet, an issue which is handily rectified via Vincent Lannoo’s snarky Vampires (2010). In this particular case, writer-director Lannoo’s bloodsuckers are definitely of the more mundane variety: they don’t turn into bats or wolves, hypnotize innocent virgins or wear flared pants. There’s nary a cape to be found and there won’t be any one-way trips to Transylvania to tromp around mist-shrouded castles. What do Lannoo’s vamps do, you might ask? Well, they end up doing a lot of the same stuff that you and I do: they raise families and deal with defiant children, fall in love, fight with each other and make fun of people they consider “beneath” them. They go to school, hold down jobs (when forced to) and live in modest suburban tract homes. On the flip side, they also devour humans and turn to ash in the sunlight, so there are a few minor differences, I suppose. These are not vampires as terrifying, other-worldly harbingers of pestilence or uber-romantic, doomed poets: these are the obnoxious neighbors that you hide behind the couch to avoid whenever they come knocking at the door.

Vampires begins with an extremely funny bit that establishes the kind of world that we’re about to step into. We’re informed that the Belgian vampire community reached out to a small, independent film crew and invited them to come interview and film the community, as a way to open up understanding between humans and vampires. After the first couple of attempts fail spectacularly (some vampires are able to control their impulses better than others), we’re told that a third film crew was actually able to complete their assignment, albeit posthumously (in one of the film’s many clever bits, the film is dedicated to “Jean, Helene, Jose, Clarrise and Jerome’s arm”). In this way, Vampires parallels itself with similar found-footage concepts, such as Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and The Blair Witch Project (1999): we’re, essentially, watching the final footage of folks who are no longer with us. With this witty intro, we’re off to the races.

We’re introduced to the filmmakers’ subjects, a small family of vampires led by constantly put-upon patriarch, Georges (Carlo Ferrante). What’s piled up on Georges plate? Well, for one thing, he’s got a wife, Bertha (Vera van Dooren) who’s more “hillbilly” than European sophisticate. He has a son, Samson (Pierre Lognay), who’s managed to violate one of the only vampire taboos by sleeping with the leader’s wife and a daughter, Grace (Fleur Lise Heuet), who yearns to be human, files her teeth down, dresses in pink and has a human boyfriend. He has a contentious relationship with the downstairs neighbors, Bienvenu (Batiste Sornin) and Elisabeth (Selma Alaoui), a couple of old-fashioned vampires who are childless, slightly stodgy and entirely disapproving of their upstairs neighbors’ “wild” lifestyle. In short: Georges biggest problem is the modern malaise of “polite” society.

As the filmmakers continue to roll camera, we get plenty of insights into what it means to be a vampire in Belgium. Their “meals” are delivered by the police and consist of “undesirables” and illegal immigrants (“We’re currently having a wave of black Malians, all of them young, between 20 and 30…delicious!”). Only vampires with children are allowed to have their own homes (explaining why poor Elisabeth and Bienvenu get stuck in the tiny basement, forced to sleep standing upright in their coffins). Each vampire family lives with a human dubbed “The Meat” that provides them with continuous sustenance and no one has to work. For vampires, it’s definitely an ideal situation.

There are, of course, always flies in the ointment and Grace’s rebellion, combined with Samson’s hotheaded stubbornness, are two of the biggest ones. As things come to a head regarding Samson’s affair with leader Little Heart’s wife, Eva (Alexandra Kamp-Groeneveld), Georges and his family will need to make some big changes, some of them decidedly life-changing and rather frightening. The scariest of them, according to Georges? Why, moving to Montreal, of course! Will Georges be able to keep his family together, all while trying his damnedest to uphold the Vampire Code of Conduct (created by Count Dracula, himself)? Will Grace get her wish? Will Elisabeth and Bienvenu get a child? Will Samson ever learn to keep it in his pants? And what about the creepy, skeletal clown vampire, Ronald, that’s propped against one of the walls: what’s his deal? The answers, of course, all lie within…if you dare!

Films like Vampires live or die (no pun intended, I swear) by how insightful their commentary is, since this is, technically, a satire and not a regular-old horror film. In that regard, Vampires is pretty exceptional, finding some rather ingenious ways to blend discussions of Belgian and French-Canadian politics/mores within the context of a modern vampire family. The notion of the police “feeding” the vampires in order to take care of their own political issues is pretty biting (sorry!), as is the discussion of how humans aid and abet the undead: another great bit occurs when the family goes to buy Grace a new coffin for her “death-day” celebration (pink, of course) and we get to hear why the human coffinmaker, Jean-Paul (Julien Dore) is so willing to work with vampires. After all, who else ever buys more than one coffin in their lifetimes? A guy’s gotta eat, right? There are also some pointed insights into the vampire notion of education, which entails watching (and laughing at) gory horror films and practicing the proper way to bite victims (in a bit that closely resembles CPR training). The vampire school is held in the same location as the human school, albeit at night. As the human school administrator admits, they’ve rarely had problems with the vampires, save for the occasional spot of blood on the walls and that one kid who went missing at Halloween years ago: pretty good odds, as far as he’s concerned.

The film also attempts (and largely succeeds at) the same kind of meta-commentary that informed another Belgian pseudo-documentary, the incendiary Man Bites Dog (1992). In that film, a film crew follows around a serial killer and ends up assisting him in his crimes, unwittingly at first but more enthusiastically as time progresses. The point is pretty clear: there’s a fine line between being an unbiased observer and being an accomplish. In Vampires, we got a similar bit when the film crew observes the pen where the vampires keep their human quarry: as the humans beg the film crew to let them out, the crew refuses, on the grounds that interfering would upset the natural dynamic that they’re going for. It’s a thought-provoking notion and throws shade on a generation that would rather capture an incident on their iPhones than actually help someone: the point is as relevant today as it was back in 1992.

While Vampires is stacked to the rafters with political and social insights, there’s also plenty of room for more traditional comic beats. In particular, Grace’s desire to become a human is extremely funny (although it becomes poignant in a later scene that provides a breath of fresh air from the film’s overriding atmosphere of sarcasm), as is Samson’s generally shitty attitude: teenagers suck, vampires or not. The bit where Samson and his friend, Steve (an American who toured with the Doors, played a long gig and woke up as a French vampire, complete with accent), kidnap a mentally disabled man from a hospital (“Now we have The Meat AND The Vegetable!”) is particularly mean but leads to one of the film’s best set-pieces as the dumbass duo accidentally convert their victim into a vampire and must then chase him about in order to “put him down.” Georges exasperated response (“You really are little jerks”) should be familiar to any parent who’s ever dealt with a willfully obnoxious kid. We also get a great bit involving Grace and Samson insulting each other with increasingly hurtful insults (“Slut!…Cocksucker!…Babytooth!…Priest!!”), as well as the priceless “Gift of the Magi” bit wherein Grace only wants to become human, while her human boyfriend would love to be a vampire: oh, you crazy kids!

The acting in Vampires, especially from Georges and his family, is quite good and goes a long way towards selling the concept: if anything, everyone underplays which makes it all that much more plausible. I was particularly taken with Batiste Sornin and Selma Alaoui as the stuffy “old-schoolers.” At first, the pair seem like kind of one-note parallels to the more modern upstairs clan but become increasingly endearing and sympathetic as we learn more about them. Ferrante is excellent as Georges, bringing quite a bit of multi-dimensionality to the role, although I was always rather confused by van Dooren’s distinctly white-trash take on Bertha: it was the only performance that seemed overly goofy and over-the-top.

While Vampires works spectacularly well as a nasty little satire, it’s less successful as a first-person POV/found-footage film. Oftentimes, the perspective is confusing, making it unclear who, exactly, is supposed to be shooting the footage. We also get several flashbacks, fashioned as old-school newsreel footage, that further confound the issue: are we to believe that the film crew is somehow able to record their interviewees’ flashbacks? Color me baffled, to say the very least. There are also some tonal inconsistencies that prove a little jarring, including a truly horrifying attack on an apartment building that feels like it belongs in a different film. None of these issues are particularly deal-breaking but they certainly detract a bit from the movie’s overall impact.

At the end of the day, Vampires is an easy recommendation for fans of both vampire films and pseudo-documentaries (iffy perspective or not, the documentary aspect still comes through loud and clear and is very reminiscent of Man Bites Dog). While the film is generally easy-going and more witty than shocking, it’s still got plenty of eye-opening bits (the discussion of vampire sexuality, by itself, opens up a pretty big can of worms that includes incest, polygamy and implied pedophilia), as well as enough genuine blood and guts to satisfy the horror crowd. While it’s not always completely cohesive, Lannoo’s Vampires is always entertaining, frequently laugh-out-loud funny and often extremely insightful. If you thought that you’d seen every kind of vampire available. give Vampires a shot: these vamps may not sparkle or mention “the children of the night,” but they sure do look a helluva lot like average, everyday people. By itself, that’s pretty damned scary.