HALLOWEEN HORROR CHALLENGE MOVIE #12 - THE COLLECTIVE VOL 4

THE COLLECTIVE VOL 4 (2012)
D. Various filmmakers
JABB PICTURES

This dvd collection of short indie films, all by different directors is a lot of fun. As with any collection it is a hit and miss bag, but the good outweighs the bad here. Each filmmaker was given an EMOTION to use as the spring board for their film. Building the narrative around it. We watched this at our INDEPENDENT SHADOW CINEMA screening so  I ended up watching the films completely out of order as they appear on the DVD, so this list does not represent the actual order.

101 TAYLOR ST opened the show for us and it was a good place to start. Directed by Jabb Pictures Jason Hoover the emotion taken on here is DENIAL (arguably not an emotion as much as act but whatever). The film is designed almost like a documentary with a droning narration telling us the story of an elderly woman who turned out to be one of they most prolific serial killers of the mid west. The film is constructed of a series a very well shot tableaux of the area's landscapes. It is the most experimental film in the package and is entirely effective. It creates a deep seated mood. The emotion should have been DREAD because the movie builds plenty of it. 

Next up is HAPPY HOOKER BANG BANG from filmmaker David Paul Bonnell. He follows it up later with a second installment. The two emotions he uses are DESIRE and ENVY and he blatantly names his characters after the emotions. The first segment of this hooker duo starts out well enough with two roomates arguing about work. The more worldly of the two is a hooker and her plain friend is out of work and envy's her friends ability and money. Soon she is sneaking around, pretending to be Desire and gets tied to a bed about to be raped. The short had been straight forward and serious up to this point. But then it turns into chicks with guns comedy, letting it down. Hard. 

The second installment HAPPY HOOKER BANG BANG: A LOVE STORY dispenses with any resemblance of seriousness for a straight up comedy. Some of it is kind of funny (The pimp character, Desire pulling a bomb out of her snatch) but over all, even at ten minutes it becomes kind of tiresome.

Next is LUKE 1:17 directed by 14 year old Dakota Meyer and it is one of my favorites of the volume. The emotion here is HATE and it is a decidedly serious segment with no supernatural trappings. Two brothers are trying to get by in the emotional wreckage of their Father murdering their mother and ending up in jail. The film feels like the best of the DOGMA 95 movies with naturalistic performances and shooting style. The climax is more an emotional gut punch than a visceral one and that is why it works. This kid has more of a grip of the mechanics of film than most people twice, or three times his age. 

CONTRITION by Jim Dougherty is one of the strongest visually. But the story is ultimately very slight. Basically a werewolf story told in flashback. A geneticist accidentally creates a wolfman who turns on her family. This one clearly had the biggest budget of any of the movies and uses it well. It just could have stood another script draft to bring it all together. 

FLASH OF WIRE by David Ross is a very interesting little movie. Taking the art film approach to explore SCHADENFREUDE (The emotion of taking pleasure in the pain of others). Shot in Black and White and using Greek Mythology as a reference point the film it follows a man at the dentist explaining his dreams. Ultimately everyone in the film comes to represent Greek Gods. It is a brave approach to the genre material.  Apparently part of it was actually shot in Greece too. 

James Manning directs the ghost story DEATH DO US PART. Easily the weakest entry (despite a fetching lead who has no problem getting naked). A house is haunted by the couple who died there and the investigator slowly becomes sexually enamored with the place. Hence why the emotion here is LUST.  The segment is just way too leisurely paced for the inconsequential pay off.

FRANKIE is Jason Hoover's shot at GRIEF and is the one that has split audiences from the reviews I have read and at our screening as well. The most viscerally violent of this volume, it is one long take, with the camera circling around the protagonists, as they are tied up, interrogated and tortured by some guys they may or may not have wronged. For the most part it is quite disturbing and unsettling, it is only let down by the improv acting that works most of the time, but falls back on just saying "fuck" over and over.

Bryan Wolford’s MYCTOPHOBIA is largely very solid, grounded by a very good performance from the lead actress Kitsie Duncan. The movie deals with a woman who has an otherwise normal life but is crippled by her fear of the dark. Her therapist tells her to try getting used to the dark a little at at a time, so when her electric goes out it seems her madness will set in. But what she is unaware of is there is a very good reason to be afraid of the dark. This segment is only marred by some so so CGI. Otherwise it is one of the strongest of the set.

Finally TRUST is explored, in the form of misguided trust in the best movie of the set EPIDEMIC by Dustin Mills. It deals with an outbreak of some sort of viral infection. But we witness it through one characters slowly becoming sick until he finally  calls on the government for help. 

The one consistent annoyance for me was the filmmakers over reliance to CGI effects, 90% of them not well executed. MYCTOPHOBIA is probably the only one that called for those effects, but the others would have been much better served by just doing practical effects. 

Review © Andrew Copp

X marks the hookers

"X"

D. Jon Hewitt

IFC MIDNIGHT

2.35-1

This Australian lensed art/cum/crime flick directed by Jon Hewitt, is about a high priced call girl on her last night before flying the nest to Paris vs a teenage whore on her first night in the job. The two women end up working a job for a drug dealer who is killed by a rogue cop sending them in the run.

The movie tries to be gritty and street level in the depiction of a prostitutes life. But it never really is. This is a fantasy version of a whore's life complete with dirty old men asking for silly prices and rich drug dealers making the women come when eating them out. The crime element becomes increasingly silly and is hard to take seriously except for one head crushing scene clearly inspired by IRREVERSIBLE. The movie is about as edgy as JOHN LANDIS' 80's comedy movie INTO THE NIGHT, but not as funny or well made. 

What this movie DOES have going for it is some very impressive night time photography, and seedy location work. But outside of that, this is simply never as ugly, or shocking as the filmmakers clearly think it is.

watch for underground writer Jack Sargeant

And fellow Aussie director Richard Wolstencroft in cameo's during a strip club scene.

A well shot, well intended, but ultimately very silly movie. 

Review © Andrew Copp
 
 

A Pound of Flesh for some boobs please!!!

A POUND OF FLESH (20121)
D. Tamar Simon Hoffs
Liquid Films
1.66

This flaming piece of trash is one of the most painful films I have had to sit through in many a moons. I generally do not give totally trashing reviews of flicks, preferring to concentrate on stuff I can lead people to that they may enjoy. But I got sent this one to review and thus have a duty to follow through with it.

POUND OF FLESH is about an older college professor at an upscale ivy league school played by Malcolm McDowell (who also produced this thing) who begins to pimp his lovely but bitchy female students to the lonely male staff. Problem being that those other teachers turn out to be some mean spirited bastards whose sexual problems who abuse and kill the girls leaving him to out to dry when the very cliché ridden cops come a calling. 

 I'm pretty sure these ho's aren't in the movie. But according to the website they are.

The film opens with a particularly graphic scene of an older man, a busty young girl and a shotgun that tricks you into thinking you may be getting a sleazy little potboiler. Then the real movie begins and you realize you are getting a lazily shot, poorly acted, vanity production that has very little going for it except they could afford a name actor. The script is just a collection of clichés roped together into dialogue and boring scenes, Until finally it climaxes in a scene that feels like it is snatched out of any cop on the run flick.

But what makes it suck especially bad is the continuing voice over from McDowell that is incessant and tries to band each nonsensical scene together. Instead it just makes you want to puncture your ear drums. The voice over just reminds you that not much of anything is happening, and what little that IS happening is flat out horrible.

Easily the worst thing I have seen this year so far.

Review © Andrew Copp

Humping trash could give you an infection...

Day twenty of the September Exploitation Challenge (yes I have fallen WAY behind) is when I took out the trash...

TRASH HUMPERS (2010)
D. Harmony Korine
Alcove Entertainment
Shot on VHS!!!

I will freely admit I went into this wanting to hate it. Figuring I would hate it. The trailer doesn’t try to sell it for anything it is not. The movie is basically just Harmony Korine and a couple of other people dressed in cheap joke store old people mask, running around acting stupid and literally humping trash cans. To make matters worse it is shot on old school sub-standard VHS equipment, edited between two VCR’s (the play, pause and rewind on screen displays have as much screen time as some of the characters) complete with tape drop out and fucked up color balance. The whole thing is designed to look cheap, immature, and like it was done by people with no skills or talent. I suppose the argument here is that the movie is designed to be “anti-art” or “anti-filmmaking” since Korine was part of Lars Von-Trier’s whole DOGMA 95 deal back in the day, and Korine’s best film came out of his time working within those constraints (I am immensely fond of JULIAN DONKEY BOY, but generally detest the dude’s other work).  So maybe that is his point. Or maybe he was just screwing around. Who knows. 

 "One critic called this JACKASS for the Psuedo-intellectual set. I can see that being accurate."

Which ever, he managed what would have been completely impossible had any other person made this exact same movie. He got it released, put into major festivals, it played art house theaters and now is seeing the light of day not only on DVD but in some rather cool special edition packaging.  Had any other underground filmmaker made this exact same movie they would have been laughed out of town, called an idiot, and had their equipment smashed. Their career would be effectively over. But oddly enough Korine has seen some of the better reviews he has gotten in a long time. Which I think goes to show that a cult of personality can certainly get you a long long way in ths business. 

 "Trash collection for the 21st century."

But what is most important is the actual work itself. Irregardless of my wanting to hate it because of everything I state above, I actually did not. TRASH HUMPERS is far from a good movie, hell you almost cannot even call it a movie, but there is a certain quality about it that becomes mesmerizing after a while. While most of it is inane, stupid, puerile and without a purpose, once in a while there are images that stumble across the screen to grab hold of the mind’s eye and stay there. Sometimes those will be humorous such as the little bespectacled kid in the three piece suite explaining the proper way to bash a baby doll's head in. Sometimes it is just a flash of beautiful scenery or landscape. By the half hour mark I found myself wondering if Korine knew, or even cared what he was putting on screen at all, or if this was just complete randomness. Then suddenly there is a jarring shot of a nude dead body, laying in a field, just like a piece of trash the movie has been obsessing over. This feels like the filmmakers just found this dead man and shot it for the movie (though clearly they did not). At this point I became aware that the cameraman is supposed to be a character in the movie too as he is singing a little nursery rhyme about “three little devils who jumped over a wall” as he surveys this corpse. The moment is supremely haunting. Maybe because so much of the half hour leading up was so deadening, I don’t know? But it got my attention. From this point on a tiniest thread of a plot had started to emerge in which the four characters we have been watching fuck around, break shit and hump trash are also traveling around killing people. There seems to be an obsession with baby dolls going on throughout the proceedings (one of the “characters” is female it is important to note) which eventually ties in to a haunting and surprisingly, in its own twisted way, tender finale. 

 "I think she was one of my high school teachers."

The movie is still more of an art piece/ endurance test than an actual film, but in the second half it at least starts to resemble a narrative. With more of the startling and haunting moments seeming to be on purpose as opposed to things that just happened to be in front of the camera at the right time.

TRASH HUMPERS might be best described as a movie to watch once. It might be fun to see in an art theater with a crowd though. To see who it pisses off and who over pontificates it to the point of great art. Because at the end of the day I still get the feeling Harmony Korine is having a laugh at the art scene that has embraced him as much as he was just tooling around fucking off while making the movie. But to my shock and surprise his end product has something there to offer when I seriously thought it would not at all. 

Review © Andy Copp