The 31 Days of Halloween (2018): 10/1-10/7

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31 Days of Halloween, Halloween, Halloween traditions, horror, horror films, Jeremy Saulnier, Marrowbone, Movies, Murder Party, October, Pyewacket, The Lodgers, The Witch

Welcome to 2018, folks: the VHS Graveyard has officially risen from its undead slumber to feast upon the free-time of unsuspecting passerby! We’ll address the protracted silence in a future update but, for now, let’s dive right into the meat of the matter with that best time of the year: the 31 Days of Halloween.

Long-time readers will know that October is regarded as the most sacred of months by yours truly: as such, I forego any and all films that aren’t (at least implicitly) horror. My intention for this year was to watch at least one horror film for every day in October: while the first part of the month hasn’t necessarily borne this out, there’s still  plenty of October to get through. One that note, I now present the first week of the 31 Days of Halloween.

10/01/2018-10/07/2018

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The Witch (2016)

When I first watched Robert Eggers’ The Witch, I was endlessly impressed by the film’s reserve and creeping, oppressive atmosphere, finding it to be one of the highlights of a pretty good year for horror cinema. I didn’t like it as much this time around, although there’s no denying the moments of brilliance. In some ways, this is akin to my current response to the original Blair Witch Project: it just doesn’t grab me like it used to.

This tale of religious paranoia, persecution and the devil in New England may be timelier now than when it was released (particularly the focus on female agency) but my latest re-watch found me focusing much more on the stagey performances (the twins, in particular, are insufferable) than the subtext and I found myself wishing there were a bit more room for speculation regarding the title character. The whole thing comes off as both too blunt and too vague but it’s still a potent cocktail, when the mix is right.

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Marrowbone (2018)

Writer/director Sergio G. Sanchez impressed with his script for slow-burner The Orphanage: his newest, Marrowbone, isn’t quite as successful. This Southern Gothic mashup of The Others, The Lovely Bones and Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead (yep) concerns the title decaying estate and the fractured family that have taken its name as their own. A tight-knit family of brothers and sisters must deal with hauntings both literal and metaphorical, along with the all-too concrete evils of the outside world. When an unfortunate chain of events topples the fragile balance, the results prove catastrophic.

In many ways, Sanchez’s Marrowbone is only nominally a horror film: the focus is firmly on the real-world miseries of these characters, much like Mike Flanagan’s new The Haunting of Hill House series, rather than any monsters. There’s still much here for genre fans to dig their teeth into, however, including a positively Hitchcockian sequence involving a signature and several tense cat-and-mouse chases. The downside, unfortunately, is that too much of the film plays as intensely silly and the resolution strains credulity way too much to be effective. There are lots of good intentions but the results are unfortunately average.

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The Lodgers (2018)

There’s a lot to like about Brian O’Malley’s The Lodgers, although I suspect it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Twin brother and sister live on their own in a secluded, crumbling mansion with something very strange in the basement. They live by three basic rules: be in bed by midnight, let no stranger inside the door and never leave each other’s side. When the twins turn eighteen and the sister starts falling for a recently-returned war veteran, however, the delicate balance is upset and the Lodgers come calling.

This Gothic fairy tale looks gorgeous and features one of the coolest decaying mansions this side of Crimson Peak: it also has a serious case of the Lovecrafts and that undercurrent of cosmic dread is a big part of the film’s atmosphere. The languid pace and uncomfortable subject matter might turn off viewers but I liked this quite a bit and might even have loved it with a few less side-plots and a tighter finale. If nothing else, this was a definite step up from O’Malley’s last film, the absurd Let Us Prey.

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Murder Party (2007)

An unassuming schlub finds an invitation to a Halloween eve “murder party” on the sidewalk and eagerly accepts because he’s got nothing else to do besides fight with the cat for his chair. Upon arrival at said destination (in his spiffy, handmade cardboard armor, no less), our hero finds a group of moronic, costumed hipsters who really do plan to kill him, provided they can get their heads out of their asses. What follows is one of the funniest, bloodiest and most memorable horror-comedies ever, predating Tucker & Dale vs Evil by several years and recalling nothing so much as the bonkers early films of Peter Jackson.

Before he was the talk of the town with indie hits like Blue Ruin and Green Room, writer/director Jeremy Saulnier kicked things off with this unsung gem. Murder Party is one of those rare films that just gets everything right: the humor is great, the practical effects are well-done and astoundingly gory, the script is smart and zippy, the acting is strong and it never feels shabby, despite its obviously low budget. There’s a great performance by Saulnier regular Macon Blair, firmly tying this to his canon. Murder Party is even set on Halloween, making this a no-brainer for seasonal consumption. And there’s a cute cat named Sir Lancelot. Just watch the damn thing already!

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Pyewacket

A teen girl gets mad at her mom and does the only sensible thing: she summons a demon named Pyewacket to snuff her out. When the young lady has a change of heart, however, will it be as simple to call off the (Hell)hounds? This is the question posed by actor-turned-director Adam MacDonald’s newest film, Pyewacket, which follows up his killer bear debut, Backcountry. While I must admit ignorance regarding Backcountry (it’s still on my to-see list), I had heard many good things about his follow-up via festival performances. As usual, the buzz was a little overly enthusiastic.

While there are moments where MacDonald’s sophomore feature threatens to approach The Babadook, it never quite reaches those heady heights. Truth be told, Pyewacket is held back by a general lack of imagination and innovation: everything here has a familiar feel and the often iffy performances really don’t help matters. There are disturbing moments, without a doubt, but they’re too often undercut by the amateurish dramatics and lackluster payoffs. We never feel as connected to the core of the story as we should and that’s a real shame: Pyewacket isn’t a terrible film but it’s very rarely a great film and it could’ve been.

Stay tuned for week two: coming soon!

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.