Showing at the Showroom: Catfish

It’s a hopeless period for films of the less-said-the-better ilk, but the new documentary Catfish hangs on this ledge more precariously than most. Acutely aware that reviews built on nothing but vagueness and generalities make for incredibly tedious reading, I will keep it brief. The short message: go and see it, preferably before some blabbermouth spoils it.

The thumbnail synopsis is that it’s the record of a slowly blossoming internet relationship-come-romance between a young New York photographer Nev, and Megan the half-sister of an 8 year old painting prodigy that’s taken to painting Nev’s work and sending it to him. Egged on by brother and friends, a trio set off to finally unite Nev and Megan ‘in real life’. When they finally get to rural Michigan ‘all is not as it seems’ and shit gets very ‘real’.

Beyond the contrivance and thriller cliché of the film’s blurb, the film builds towards its grand reveal, the volte face, the upending of everything by almost convincing you of its predictability. The endless narcissism of the project and its filmmakers gives the whole thing a decidedly questionable whiff of the Blair Witch Project, and the rather earnest and self-involved inflection of the oh-we’re-not-fauxumentary. And then the almighty SNAP comes, and you’re just left struggling to hold onto what the hell is going on. It’s frankly terrifying, and quite brilliant for just that.This is far from the first documentary this year to have foyer-critics hemming and herring over ‘what is REAL, really, in the greater scheme of things?’ But film philosophy undergraduatese aside, it delights me that in a connected dispute over music rights, the filmmakers might be forced to swear on oath to the veracity of the film. On oath! The TRUTH will finally come out! Or maybe we could just enjoy the film for the tangled and baffling mess that it is?

Five out of Five

Catfish is showing at the Showroom cinema in Sheffield from the 17th of December 2010.

The Beyond

A word of advice: never, ever, attempt to eat dinner while watching a Video Nasty.

That may be the most obvious statement in the world, but up until this point I’d quite happily whiled hours away watching Axe or even the autocannibalistic Anthropophagus while having bolognese, or the occasional pie and chips. The Beyond however, has broken new territory in terms of gore, effectively putting me off the film/food combination for the foreseeable future. The revulsion I felt while trying to have cottage pie during the first ten minutes of this film almost put me clean off Video Nasties all together. Faces covered in acid, melting and bubbling away does not good dinner company make.

Aside from the ridiculously stomach-testing gore, Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond stands out from the morass of films on the DPP list (covered so far) as a rock solid horror in its own right. A passable script which harks back to Lovecraft, a spectrum of decent actors who know how to look terrorized when necessary, and a budget bigger than cost of an average car. Throw in some location shooting in Louisiana, and you have a thoroughly shocking film.  Perhaps most satisfyingly of all, it has a cinematographer who knows how to use his camera, creating shots which give the carnage beyond chucking red paint around. After the flat camera work of The Beast in Heat and the sub-art-school student shooting of Axe, The Beyond proves to be a visual feast.

The premise of a young and successful woman acquiring a haunted hotel in Louisana is pretty workaday in terms of haunted house films. The over-reaching blonde, destined to be terrorised into submission, and eventual victory, blah-di-blah, heard it all before. The Beyond goes one step further by placing the hotel on one of the seven gates to Hell, and consequently hordes of the shuffling dead end up stumbling into disrupt our poor ladies renovation plans. Absurd as it sounds, the premise gives the film a bonafide hellish overtone, mixing unspeakable horrors with the restless damned crawling out of limbo. These are not just corpse-puppets, animated by some obscure Macguffinesque virus, but the product of something larger and far more sinister. It is, quite simply, the tagline of Dawn of the Dead come true: “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth”

Following the tremendous success of Zombi II (unofficial sequel to the very same Dawn of the Dead) and City of the Living Dead, Fulci had established his name internationally as a director of top drawer zombie flicks. Wary of being tied to such a narrow niche, Fulci sought to strike out in a new direction of horror with his next film. The first script of The Beyond was initially penned as a straight haunted house film, but under pressure from his zombie-hungry German financers, Fulci was convinced to include zombies to help provide a physical presence of horror. The combination was, and still is, tremendously effective.

The terror of the subjective is explored in full, with the film’s heroine is constanly uncertain of what she is seeing and hearing. An eerie blind young girl and her German Shepherd repeatedly warn Liza away from the hotel, and their warnings might be heeded if they didn’t constantly appear to her in the most dreamlike of sequences. Clinging mist, clipped dialogue and numerous doubletakes lend these sequences a truly uncanny edge. Liza is told that she’s just a figment of her imagination, yet the poor blind girl ends up getting mauled by her own dog. A physical and gruesome end to a weirdly ethereal character.

The gore is really testing, even for the most hardened blood’n'guts fiends. While the sequences leading up to the burst of violence are grippingly shot, the piercing/popping/ripping/bubbling moments in question are unflinching, more often than not in extreme close-up. Is it gratutious? In part yes, but the horror of it all has such an impact that it cannot be dispelled as frivolous. One sequence of a man’s face getting ripped to shreds by massive (dummy) spiders is particularly hard to shake off, and I’m not even that much of an arachnophobe.

The last ten minutes of the film turns into a slightly ridiculous rollercoaster, lurching from the hotel, to an explosive yet straight-laced zombie shoot-out in the hospital, to a bizarre relocation back to the underbelly of the hotel again. Before your head’s had a chance to stop spinning Liza and her last minute knight in shining armour have stumbled into the underworld. Stunned by the unspeakable and unseen ‘things’ they witness, the film ends with them blinded, glaring horrified back at the camera. A brilliant Lovecraftian flourish to end on, and a bleak and satsifying end to a brilliant horror film.

Against the Dark

Great films are all about High Concept. If you can’t boil it down to one sentence then the throbbing hordes of cinemagoers don’t want to know. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford? Way too much going on there, and the audience avoided it in their droves. Snakes on a Plane? You couldn’t keep the bastards from beating the door down on opening day. To hell with ‘art’ and ‘craft’ the devil is in the detail, so strip all detail out and you are left with the purest gold of heavenly concept.

Now working on such a notion we could conclude that –

Budget ÷ Purity of Concept = Box Office Success

(Purity) is defined by the number of words in the simplest possible description of any feature (Concept). By extension, the lower the word count the proportionally greater the film will be in recouping its costs. The equation of course necessitates that there be a definite concept, for a film without a screenplay (Purity of Concept = Zero) in turn reaps no profit. Such films are generally known as art installations, and broadly speaking operate outside the parameters of conventional filmmaking. The only know demonstrable exception to this rule are the collected works of David Lynch, which defy all applicable theorems.

By considering such an equation Segal’s latest direct-to-video release Against the Dark should rate highly in the article of purity, with a concept defined as such:

Seagal, Zombies.

Detractors would argue for alternatives such as ‘Seagal vs Zombies’, ‘Seagal kills Zombies’, or even ‘Seagal against Zombies’, yet the lower value holds true as the cinemagoer need only know that there is the presence of both Seagal and Zombies. How they are related or are involved is irrelevant beyond knowing they are both in the same film. As a result almost total purity of concept is achieved.

The irony that there is next to no Seagal or Zombies in this film has little or no bearing on its potential financial success. Concepts are like film titles, indicative of a features level of exploitation, which is to say the extent by which something is promised but not delivered. That this film should instead be about a gaggle of survivors with a dizzying mix of British and American accents running around an inescapable hospital intercut with sporadic shots of Seagal waddling to and fro, has little to no bearing on the films potential for financial success.

Indeed this film demonstrates in full effect the absolute minimum of Seagal you need in it for it to remain a ‘Seagal film’. It would be charitable even to consider this little more than a running cameo. Again and again he just bursts in, throws a few slices of his sword, makes a comment (not even a one-liner!) and then the scene ends. Rinse, repeat. Again and again and again.

The film then fails in having a budget which cannot afford to hire even its own producer for more than a day of shooting, this despite him being the headline star. With box office success (or in this case rental success) being relative to budget, Against the Dark will categorically fail regardless of the purity of concept. It fails almost completely (but unfortunately not wholly) to the point of non-existence. To all intent purposes this is a Non-film.

Pushing almost into the sphere of quantum physics, this film is much like Schroedinger’s Cat, existing while simultaneously not existing. In this respect the films of Steven Seagal may be a force unto themselves in this equation, and only further research will clarify this matter.