10/4/14 (Part One): They Sin So You Don’t Have To

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31 Days of Halloween, Andre Royo, bad priests, based on a graphic novel, Catholic church, cinema, Clancy Brown, Clifton Collins Jr., Dan Fogler, dutiful heroes, elder gods, exorcists, Fallen, film reviews, films, Ghostbusters, Hellbenders, horror-comedies, J.T. Petty, Larry Fessenden, Last Supper, Macon Blair, Movies, religious-themed horror, Robyn Rikoon, S&man, sins, Soft For Digging, Stephen Gevedon, supernatural, Surtr, The Augustine Interfaith Order of Hellbound Saints, The Burrowers, writer-director

In an era where ideas (and films) seem to get recycled with as much ease as hand-me-down clothes, it’s more than refreshing to come across an original concept: it’s downright life-affirming. Writer/director J.T. Petty’s Hellbenders (2012) has one hell of an original concept, pun intended: six priests, all of various denominations, exist in a state of constant sin so that they may serve as the “nuclear option” for exorcisms. When there are demons that are too powerful for “regular” exorcists to handle, the team swoops in, invites the demons to possess them and then commit suicide, thereby dragging the demons straight back to hell with them. What this really is, of course, is a perfect excuse to witness priests swear, booze it up and engage in some very bad behavior, ranging from the slightly assholish to the downright blasphemous. It’s a great concept and almost guarantees an interesting film: even though the final product ends up a religious-themed Ghostbusters (1984) with a touch of Fallen (1998), there’s enough wicked good times here to make genre fans pay attention.

The film actually has a rather inauspicious beginning as we witness Angus (Clancy Brown), Larry (Clifton Collins, Jr.) and Det. Elrod (genre auteur Larry Fessenden) tromping around in some nondescript attic-area, lit only by flashlight. The scene recalls [REC] (2007), which seems like a strange point of reference, before jumping into some sloppy pseudo-mockumentary, talking-head-type footage. Just when things seemed to be taking a turn for the generic, however, the glorious opening credit sequence swooped in and saved the day: set to a swaggering, stomping tune, we see our six heroes arrayed around a table, Last Supper style, engaging in everything from excessive drinking to make grilled cheese sandwiches with a Jesus sandwich-press. It’s a silly, visually impressive and, most importantly, utterly badass intro and ends up setting an impossibly high bar for the rest of the film. For a time, however, the movie almost lives up to its potential.

Our resident exorcists are Angus, the de facto leader and oldest of the group; Larry, the second-in-command (fulfilling the Peter Venkman role); Elizabeth (Robyn Rikoon), the resident spitfire who casually sleeps around with Larry; Stephen (Andre Royo), the “accountant” of the group, who keep track of their ledger of sins; Eric (Dan Fogler), who not-so-secretly pines for Elizabeth and Macon (Macon Blair), the free-lovin’ Southern Baptist minister who’s obsessed with his pretty-boy looks. The group lives together, cracking wise and engaging in their various sins with gusto, living just like a parochial version of the Ghostbusters. Their antics may be necessary as far as keeping the world safe goes but they certainly don’t go over well with certain bureaucratic elements at the Vatican, as evidenced when holy pencil-pusher Clint (Stephen Gevedon) comes around to keep an eye on the wayward priests. He definitely approve of the drinking, drug use, fornicating and blasphemy but he seems to be even more irate over the inherent waste of funds: sinning be damned, the Hellbound Saints just don’t make good fiscal sense!

As with any film like this how, however, we know that our dutiful heroes will be needed even if their superiors don’t. They’re forced to spring into action when they get involved with one seriously badass demon, an elder god by the name of Surtr. It seems that Surtr is known as a “god-killer” and has roamed around eternity putting the snuff on other deities that it considers to be weaker. Surtr has now set his sets on the Judeo-Christian God and it’s up to Angus and his crew to stop it before all of Heaven is destroyed in the process. Things get complicated, however, when Elizabeth becomes possessed by Surtr but neglects to kill herself, giving the elder god an earthly vessel, as well as a convenient way to gain more followers (achieved via a noxious cloud of flies). Angus wants to kill Elizabeth in order to send Surtr to Hell. Larry, on the other hand, is in love with Elizabeth and would rather not see her suffer eternal damnation, despite it being pretty much her only job duty. With all of humanity on the line (or, at least, the Judeo-Christian portion), will love or duty win out?

For the first ten minutes or so of Hellbenders, I laughed so hard that I cried: no lie. The script is impossibly witty, choked with so much rapid-fire obscenity, bad behavior and juvenile attitude that it feels like one’s being pummeled by a prize-fighter armed with one-liners rather than fists. It’s a heady experience and, for a time, I was pretty sure this was going to be the funniest film I’d ever seen, hands down. And then, of course, the honeymoon was over and tedium began to set in: what was uproariously funny in a compressed ten minutes became wearing and tiresome over the sustained course of the film. This might sound like harsh criticism of the film and, in a way, I suppose that it is. It’s also, conversely, a big compliment: if you can stay on the film’s wavelength, it’s pretty much the apex of this type of movie. I ended up really liking the film but was disappointed, ultimately, because I didn’t love it: there was potential for so much more than was fully realized here and that kind of let me down.

Make no mistake, however: when Hellbenders is good, it’s pretty damn great. The acting is top-notch, from top to bottom, with Robyn Rikoon being particularly stellar as Elizabeth. It’s a great ensemble cast and they work together like a charm: in fact, the film really starts to come off the rails when it moves from the opening “bad priests hanging out” material into the more familiar “battling supernatural evil” territory. I’ve seen plenty of films that look exactly like the latter but precious few like the former: I really wish that we could have had a little more to get to know our priests before they were off butting heads with ancient evil in some rather clichéd fight scenes.

J.T. Petty directs the film based on his own graphic novel and there are plenty of points where the film actually feels like a big-screen comic book adaptation, not least of which is the odd moment where the film actually becomes a comic, complete with panels. That odd misstep aside, the film looks consistently great and features some pretty exemplary effects work. The film also ends up being pretty violent, which might seem like a given but is only odd when the majority of gore is loaded into the film’s conclusion: suffice to say that I was rather surprised to witness someone bite out another character’s eyes, although I was certainly forewarned when a nose was later chewed off in similar manner.

While I will freely admit that I disliked Petty’s debut feature, Soft For Digging (2001), with a zeal that I normally reserve for much shittier films, I’ve actually enjoyed the rest of his filmography quite a bit. In particular, I think that his 2008 horror-Western The Burrowers is an amazing, nearly perfect film that’s equal parts eulogy and nail-biting terror, although his found-footage experiment, S&man (2006), is an equally interesting, if substantially more flawed, production. Even though he’s never mentioned alongside the likes of current genre faves Ti West or Adam Wingard, I personally feel that Petty has the potential to be the best of the bunch, some day: The Burrowers is such a monumental achievement that I keep hoping it wasn’t his magnum opus.

Even though Hellbenders ends up in a much more familiar place than it begins, it’s still a ton of fun and seems perfect as a party/crowd film. There are plenty of glorious setpieces here, the overall storyline is pretty genius and the ensemble cast is superb, riffing off each other in near perfect synthesis. I wish that the film was able to sustain its gonzo tone longer than it does but I’m also reminded of the saying that the flame that burns twice as hot only burns half as long. Fair enough: Hellbenders is hot enough for most of its running time that I can forgive if it seems to fizzle out a bit before the conclusion. There appears to be hints at a sequel, however, which could easily take the film’s universe into some pretty awesome Hellboy-like territory. Sign me up! I may not have loved Petty’s Hellbenders but I liked it enough to anticipate the next installment. In the meantime, it’s good to know that we have people like Angus and his crew watching over us, keeping humanity safe one upraised middle finger at a time.

9/1/14 (Part One): The Coldest Dish of All

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Amy Hargreaves, Best of 2013, Blue Ruin, cinema, Devin Ratray, drama, dysfunctional family, Eve Plumb, film festival favorite, film reviews, films, History of Violence, independent films, Jeremy Saulnier, Kevin Kolack, loners, Macon Blair, Movies, Murder Party, revenge, thriller, vengeance, writer-director-cinematographer

In many ways, movies make revenge seem like not only a good solution to a variety of problems but also the coolest, most thrilling and suitable solution possible. Oh sure, there are plenty of “anti-revenge” films (Cronenberg’s astounding A History of Violence (2005) comes immediately to mind) out there but they definitely appear to be outnumbered and out-gunned by the ones in which an individual gets terribly wronged and exacts bloody vengeance to even the score. Turning the other cheek might help calm a person’s internal struggle but doesn’t seem to produce much heat at the box office: audiences don’t want to see their heroes get stomped on without some sort of recourse.

If you really think about it, however, bloody, armed revenge isn’t quite as simple as the movies make it out to be. For one thing, most people (excepting members of the armed forces, police officers, militiamen/women and soldiers-of-fortune) are woefully ill-prepared to actually “take someone out.” It may be easy to off a virtual stranger in a first-person shooting game but it’s a whole other ball of wax when said stranger is actually standing in front of you, especially if they happen to be equally armed. For another thing, revenge tends to be a circular, Mobius-like concept: after all, if you’re willing to kill someone to avenge someone else, why wouldn’t your “victim” have people behind them who were equally eager to kill you? After all, regardless of how shitty, evil or worthless a person is, everyone has family and friends (or at least acquaintances) who might be willing to avenge them: an eye for an eye, after all, tends to make the whole world blind.

Writer/director/cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier’s sophomore feature, Blue Ruin (2013), is well-aware of all these issues, yet manages to whip this potential moral quagmire into a truly ferocious, unrelenting and bleak monster of a film. In the world of Blue Ruin, there is no wrong or right: there are only varying shades of gray, marginally more caustic “sins” and the nagging notion that the only inevitability in life is the ceaseless march to the grave. While Saulnier’s film has a definite protagonist, it doesn’t really have a hero: as we see, revenge doesn’t solve anything…it just drags the avenger into the muck along with everyone else.

When we first meet our luckless protagonist, Dwight (the endlessly expressive Macon Blair), he looks like the kind of down-on-his luck fella we might find begging for change on a freeway overpass: with his matted, unruly beard and propensity for breaking into houses to bathe and steal clothes, Dwight looks like he fell off the ladder of success and hit every rung on the way down. When Dwight is picked up for vagrancy by a friendly cop, however, she drops a hint to the rest of the puzzle: “someone” is getting released from prison, a someone who Dwight seems to be very interested in. When Dwight buys a map, gets in his beat-up car (his only possession) and attempts to steal a handgun, we get the nagging suspicion that our “hero” might not have been on the mysterious “someone’s” visitor list in prison.

Sure enough, we get validation of Dwight’s intentions when he tracks the recently released inmate to a dingy bar bathroom and stabs him in the head during a horrendously botched assassination attempt. Turns out that the mysterious man is Wade Cleland, the very same individual who mercilessly killed Dwight’s parents. After killing Wade and escaping via a stolen limo, Dwight hightails it to his sister’s place: Sam (Amy Hargreaves) hasn’t seen Dwight in years and is less than thrilled to see him now, particularly once he explains how he just slaughtered their parents’ killer in cold blood. Sam has kids, which adds another layer to her upset at the situation: “I’d forgive you if you’re crazy but you’re not: you’re weak,” she tells him.

As can be expected in situations like this, Wade’s got quite a few folks who are more than a little upset to bury him, not least of which is his equally larcenous family. Brother Teddy (Kevin Kolack) is the first to come hunting for Dwight but sisters Kris (Eve Plumb) and Hope (Stacy Rock) might just be more deadly. Throw in slightly nerdy brother, William (David W. Thompson), and Dwight has quite a stacked house against him. Lucky for him that he also has a friend in the person of Ben Gaffney (Devin Ratray), an old friend who saves Dwight’s life, gets him a gun, a place to hideout and some pretty sage advice: “I know this is personal…that’s why you’ll fail. No talking, no speeches…you point the gun, you shoot the gun.”

With his back to the wall, Dwight must now do everything he can to prevent harm from coming to Sam and her kids. This, of course, isn’t the easiest course of action since the Clelands are now in a complete blood frenzy: they never reported the murder to the authorities, meaning they plan to keep the whole incident in-house. Dwight will have to follow his initial actions through to their logical conclusion, leaving us with this impossible question: how many people must die before the scales are evenly balanced on both sides? Is one life worth more than another? Are “bad guys” really bad when the camera’s not pointed at them or are we all “bad guys” to someone else?

I’ve had my eye on Jeremy Saulnier ever since I fell in love with his debut feature, the outrageously great Murder Party (2007), so I expected really great things from his follow-up. Luckily, Blue Ruin managed to either meet or blow-away all of my expectations. Saulnier’s cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, giving the film a rich, full look that belies its low-budget. He manages to make the film’s color palette an integral part of its theme: true to advertising, the film does have a pretty “blue” look, which ends up being extremely evocative. The script is also extremely tight and well-written: doing away with the needless “placeholder” dialogue that tends to wreck other indie films gives Blue Ruin a lean, mean feel that’s endlessly cinematic: there’s nothing about the film that screams “amateur” or “student” production, unlike many of Saulnier’s peers.

While the film can be intensely violent, there’s no glorification of said violence whatsoever. The scene where Dwight stalks and kills Wade is clumsy, violent and messy: rather than coming across as some sort of “Liam Neeson lite,” everything about Blue Ruin feels as if it’s tied into the real world. When Dwight stares in horror at the mess that Ben’s gun has made of someone else’s head, Ben nonchalantly replies, “That’s what bullets do.” This isn’t the “harmless” violence of old Westerns and gangster flicks where folks get shot and fall down, bloodlessly. These are not trained hitmen spouting pithy quips back and forth, in between the carnage: this is the kind of brutal, no-holds-barred violence that real people might engage in, folks who bleed, sweat and cry in ways that “cinema folk” usually don’t.

While the acting is pretty stellar across the board, Macon Blair’s performance as Dwight is an extra-special treat: there’s nothing about Dwight that feels stereotypical or redundant. Indeed, one of the scenes that could have come across as the silliest (the obligatory “shaving the beard” scene) packs a real wallop since we (literally) see Dwight go from being a completely fucked-up adult to a scared kid in seconds flat: beardless Dwight looks nothing like bearded Dwight, in the same way that his need for revenge has stripped away his former innocence. It’s like stepping into a time machine and ends up being one of the film’s smartest elements.

Truth be told, Blue Ruin is just about as close to perfect as this type of film gets. While the character development could have been a little more subtle (we basically get the entire backstory in one massive info dump, thanks to Teddy), the film throws in some genuinely ingenious twists, including a major one that puts a whole new spin on Dwight’s quest for revenge (sometimes, bad things only look bad from your angle: what may seem like senseless violence might actually be someone else’s quest for revenge). The acting is superb, the film is exquisitely crafted and chugs along with a truly breath-taking sense of urgency. Full of thrilling action sequences but with its head firmly screwed-on, Blue Ruin is that rarest of beasts: an intelligent, grim, relentless action film that does everything in its power to strip the cinematic stardust from previous revenge films.

While there’s nothing glorious about the violence in Blue Ruin, there’s something truly glorious about the film, itself. Be sure to keep an eye on Saulnier: all signs point to this guy taking the world by storm and you’re gonna want to be on his team when he does. Utterly essential viewing and one of the best films of 2013, hands-down.