A mother's love

On the opposite spectrum of the horror genre from Frontier(s) is this small and creepy film from first time director Paul Sollet. Grace tells the story of Madeline as played by Jordan Ladd. A beautiful young woman who has had trouble conceiving with her husband. After lots of trying she finally gets pregnant. But following a car accident her baby dies but she refuses to have it taken out. She decides to carry it to term and deliver naturally. And when she does, the baby is oddly born alive. But little baby Grace has a habit of attracting flies and not wanting to drink milk but for some reason, blood.

I can't tell you how much I loved this movie, so many moments of it are just so effectively creepy and skin-crawling. And that means a lot coming from a jaded horror fan like me. Ladd gives a great performance as a mother who refuses to acknowledge that something is seriously wrong with her daughter. It's a perfectly reasonable stance but one that gets more and more crazy as the film unravels.

Paul Sollet had a weird tendency to film close-ups of food and make it all seem disgusting. It was a way to get under our skin and make us uneasy throughout the film. Combine that with a very still and methodical camera and we can't help but be waiting for the shock to come. And that's what makes it so great. It's such a slow burn that comes to a boil fairly late in the film. But it's so satisfying and yet it brings us to another point in the film where we can't help but think, "what now?".

This is a movie that needs to be discovered and recommended to friends. Not only to let more people find out about it but to also see friends reactions and see which ones decide to stop speaking to you. Use it to weed out the uncool kids.

Incest and table saws.

Goddamn! It's been a while since I watched a horror film that actually had the balls to go all out and not care about offending anyone. A film that doesn't aim to give you a message. A film that's completely content to spill blood unrepentantly. That film is Xavier Gans' Frontier(s). Another in a growing line of French horror films that has cemented them as the reigning kings of international horror. High Tension, Inside, Martyrs and this. All able to not only be scary but also present the gory goods that we American horror fans have grown tired of Hollywood failing to deliver.

This particular one starts off during the French race riots of the mid '00s. It follows a group of characters that have just committed a heist of some sort. The details of the heist are never given and are not important. They split up in two groups and agree to meet at a small hotel in the French countryside. The first group gets there and meets the family that runs the place. As an audience member we know that things aren't right but the characters are typically ignorant of this fact until it's too late. Things go downhill for them fast and we are forced to watch as the second group, consisting of a girl named Yasmine and her former boyfriend, get to the same hotel. What follows is a brutal example of what human beings are capable of.

Without going into spoilers let me just say that tables are turned and a hell of a lot more blood is spilled. Yasmine is not going quietly into that dark night. This movie delivered exactly what I needed. It has proactive characters who tried different things to escape. One of the things that I hate the most in horror films are characters that ignore the dangers and are given every opportunity to escape and yet don't. Eden Lake being a recent example. One of the absolute worst films I've had the displeasure of sitting through. A 90 minute movie where the main characters ignore the danger for an hour and then do nothing to get back at their torturers besides running away. Inactive protagonists , one the worst sins a filmmaker can choose to commit.

In this movie the characters become aware of danger and then immediately attempt to flee and fail. That's all I need. Just an attempt and I'm able to agree with everything that follows. And in this one what follows is painful and absolutely delightful revenge. Xavier Gans makes the film feel dirty, you want to take a shower after seeing it. He keeps the tension up and is not afraid of showing us the gore in excruciating detail. He failed to follow this film up when he chose to make the adaptation of the video-game Hitman, but I have hope that he'll return to this type of film later on down the road.

Punters and cheaters

It took me a long time to get around to finally watching Mike Hodge's 1998 film Croupier but I'm glad I did. This is one of Clive Owen's first starring roles and with it he showed all the talent that we know associate with him. He plays a down on his luck writer named Jack. A guy who's struggling to write a commissioned novel about soccer while living in a cramped basement apartment in London. His father calls him up one day to tell him that he;s managed to get him an interview at a casino. Jack has skills as a dealer from his old life in South Africa so he decides that he'll take the job but only for a little while. He doesn't want to find himself in that world again after it's insinuated that it took him a lot to get out of it. But as one could guess, he starts to enjoy it again. He loves seeing people lose and he occasionally tries out little psychological experiments on the gamblers he deals cards to.

Jack sees his new environment and all the seedy characters that inhabit it as the perfect setting for a book. The job not only has provided him a source of income but of inspiration. He juggles his job, his book and his relationship with his needy girlfriend. As he maintains this tough balance he is thrown an offer by a seductive female gambler played by "ER"s Alex Kingston. She needs his help in staging a heist in his casino. He'll get 10,000 pounds at the start and another 10,000 after. But this movie isn't about this plot point. It's barely there and it's only one more thing in his life that he must deal with.

This is not a heist movie as I was led to believe. It is totally a character piece. A methodically paced and well written look into the psyche of Jack. A man who hates who he is but knows that changing his ways is only a way for him to lie to himself. He refuses to stray from his path. Mike Hodges makes his movie feel increasingly claustrophobic. Jack's apartment, the casino that's located in a basement as well, even the cars feel small. The walls are closing in on Jack and it's up to him to make a choice or stay trapped in it all forever. Hodges keeps the film well paced and has quite the eye for real locations. Not real as in "Hollywood" real. Real as in "I can almost smell the smoke and despair in the air".

Mike Hodges is a pro at giving us a look into the underworld of Britain. He proved it with his 1971 classic Get Carter and later reunited with Clive Owen for his 2003 film I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. A movie that I would have assumed would have had a cult following by now. Too bad I was wrong. Croupier is quite a unique movie and I'm glad I watched it. Even if it wasn't what I thought it was going to be.

Highly Gifted Toddlers and Egg Men

Good satire is incredibly difficult to pull off. The writer is walking that tightrope between being relevant and being too goofy. The best satires are the ones that are able to bite back at institutions and the established status quo while revealing their hypocrisies and their ability to use dual personalities when it's convenient for them. Bad satire only makes you laugh at how ridiculous some people and groups are. Well made satire makes you laugh while instilling a sense of fear when you realize how right it is and how wrong it is that those people are in charge.

Armando Iannucci's 2009 film In The Loop walks that tightrope with admirable balance. It revolves around the chaos a British government minister, played with innocent clueless-ness by Tom Hollander, causes when he says in a radio interview that war in the Middle East is unforeseeable. This slip of the tongue sets off his public relations specialist Malcolm Tucker on a rampage of profanities and insults that would make David Mamet and Oliver Wilde blush. Tucker now has to try to salvage the situation and not let certain American interests use it as an excuse for war. Everything snowballs and pulls in tons of inept and two-faced characters. Each one with their own agenda. It's in this quagmire that Iannucci lets his characters loose with their beautiful and endlessly hilarious use of the King's English.

This movie is going to be remembered forever by those who are fans of the art of intelligent and vulgar insults. It's a movie that knows that profanity for the sake of profanity stops being funny after a while and is in no way smart. It understands that swears are to be used as an added kick to an insult and not just the insult itself.

I can't pick out one single supporting performance to shine a light on because they are all way too funny. James Gandolfini as a peace loving hypocritical general is a calm but intimidating presence, even when he's lost during a lunch party. Steve Coogan pops in as a resident of Hollander's village who is increasingly mad about a crumbling wall in his mother's backyard. A wall that is no way subtle in it's metaphor for the war. The always reliable David Rasche plays the assistant Secretary of State. A man who is the typical Republican bureaucrat and who knows all about the art of spin and who carries an easily understandable hatred for David O. Russell's pretentious two hour metaphysical masturbatory session I Heart Huckabee's. A movie that I recommend to you if you're on the fence about committing suicide. It'll help get you there.

The movie does hit some stumbling blocks when it comes to a lack of focus. It bounces off a few too many characters and as such loses it's forward momentum about half way through. That's not to say it's boring, it's the polar opposite of boring. It just needed a more controlled sense of order in it's plot's intentions. But the movie is one that I feel will improve upon future viewings and one that I will be quoting for years to come. Hell, I already am quoting it.

Femme Fatales and Dogs

I just noticed that I started this blog as a love letter to noir and horror and I haven't written anything on a film noir yet! Yep, I'm an idiot.

Well what can I say about The Killing that hasn't already been said before? This is Stanley Kubrick's third movie after Fear and Desire and Killer's Kiss and it's my personal favorite of his. My second being Dr. Strangelove, but you didn't ask about that so let's move on.

This movie is a typical film noir. Criminals, femme fatales and a bleak ending. Sterling Hayden, in another great performance, plays Johnny Clay. A career criminal who finds out about a perfect heist. A plan to steal all the money at a racetrack during one of the year's biggest races.

Hayden goes about rounding up the best team for the job. But like most noirs, each comes with some baggage. One being the shrill wife of a character played by Elisha Cook Jr. An actor who has to hold the record for playing the most losers in film noir history. I can't help but imagine if Cook was shit upon as much in real life like he was in these movies. With his team in place, Hayden goes about setting the plan in motion.

The mechanics of the heist are what constitutes most of the movie and they are so expertly staged and played out that you can't help but stare intently at how perfect it all is. Kubrick keeps the pace up while holding our rapt attention. But no plan is perfect, no matter how many times you look it over. And this plan is unraveled by that most unpredictable factor of most film noirs, human nature. All working it's way to one of my all time favorite endings. An ending that makes the title of this review very appropriate.

Check this movie out and witness the birth of one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. I first saw this movie on TCM when I was about 14 and I rewatch it every year or so. It's one of the first noirs I ever watched and it help kick start my obsession. I love this film so much and I hope whoever reads this decides to give it a shot.

Teenagers go into woods. Teenagers die.

I have an affinity for 70's and 80's horror. Well, not so much an affinity. More like an obsession. That was a time when those types of movies were pure unadulterated mayhem with no lofty goals of trying to be smart or relevant to the times. The 70's gave us down and dirty horror flicks like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left. FIlms that were just oppressingly nihilistic. While the 80's gave us more fun, and a hell of a lot gorier, horror movies where the heroes, mostly the virgin, emerged victorious but not without the cost of a few dozen of their friends dying or the exposure of a good amount of boobage. Then the 90's came and tried to be post-modern and self-referential with their horror. Scream being the most obvious of these. They were cute at first but then very quickly became stale and too safe.

With The Hills Run Red we get a very entertaining pastiche of all of these distinctive eras of horror. It has the brutality of the 70's, the gore and boobs of the 80's and the self-awareness of the 90's. It's about three friends who venture into the woods to find the filming locations, and quite possibly a copy, of a lost horror film. A film that was so scary that it was pulled from theaters and no copies exist. It wouldn't be a horror film if things went well. The film manages to set up various horror cliches while turning them upside down. Cell phones work, characters bring guns and most of the characters act smartly. Problem for them is that the killer is smart too and not just a stupid mutant hillbilly.

The movie is short and never overstays it's welcome while managing to give reliable character actor William Sadler a good and memorable role as the lost film's director. A man dedicated to capturing true horror on film. And while it may not be the most original horror film, credit must be given to director Dave Parker for keeping this somewhat jaded horror fan quite happy for 80 mintues.

Mute Irishmen and the psycho women who love them.

Ah, one of my personal favorites. Duane Swierczynski first came to my attention back in 2006 with this book that was recommended by a forgotten blogger. I wish I could remember him so I could thank him for sending me onto this twisted and oh so satisfying ride.

What starts off as a simple job of being a getaway driver for Lennon, a mute Irishman, devolves into a journey into Philadelphia's underworld. A place filled with losers, fiends, dirty cops and the mob. Betrayal and murder is second nature for many of the citizens of it. Lennon has to navigate various tight spots, including, but not exclusively, a concrete drain pipe, in order to get out of his fucked up situation alive.

And any book where a woman handcuffed to a radiator is still able to be kick some ass, is a book I'm recommending!

Swierczynski followed this book up with The Blonde, which is even more over the top. It's a psuedo-sequel to this but I want him to write a full blown sequel one day. I really want to see how he tops the madness in this one.

Hitmen and middle-aged women.

Max Allan Collins is one of my favorite writers. His style is incredibly blunt and, at times, sensual. This is his second Quarry book for Hard Case Crime. I had read his first one, The Last Quarry, a couple of years ago without knowing that the main character, a hitman named just Quarry, was one of Collins' on-going characters. I loved it and just recently finally got around to reading this one.

Obviously it's a prequel and a great one at that. It's the story of Quarry's first professional job as a hitman. He has to take out a college professor who's writing a damaging book that certain powerful people don't want published. Along the way he gets involved with a seductive older woman and slimy private detectives. Saying anything more will spoil it.

It's a quick read and moves very fast. People drop dead likes flies and Quarry manages to solve lots of problems with quick thinking and a gun. Now I have to throw the third book, Quarry in the Middle, onto my pile of books to read.

Greetings

What can I say about myself that the authorities haven't mentioned already? I'm a film geek who loves to devour everything he can that is related to film. I wish to be a writer at some point in the future and am using this blog to simply write about all the things I love.

Two of the things I am most enthused about is the world of horror and noir. Both in film and book form. I thoroughly enjoy discovering new and old film noirs, horror films and crime fiction. I can't say which I like better but for now let's just say that I love them both equally. That is, until one of them leaves me bleeding in a ditch and steals my wallet after framing me for murder. Which, in the the noir world, happens way too many times to count.

With this blog I want to draw your attention to things that are off the beaten path. Films, books and other various forms of media, that are not "mainstream". If that's even a relevant word these days.

But don't worry, this blog isn't going to be only about dark subject matter. I'll be pointing out other stuff too. What that stuff is, I have no idea right now but check back later.

And that ends my first entry into this disaster waiting to happen. Let the inept writing begin.