Daily Halloween: Night 3

I am a fan of British filmmaker Ben Wheatley's movies. Down Terrace is a very black black comedy with a kitchen sink aesthetic and Sightseers is, somewhat, in the same vein; Kill List starts with the kitchen sink and keeps the realistic style even as it ramps up the occult trappings on the way to its surreal ending; A Field In England is a psychedelic nonlinear historical (17^th century) drama awash in English folklore and references to alchemy. I watched the latter only a few weeks ago and, as imperfect as it might be (and I’m not sure it is – I need at least one more viewing), I love his fearlessness and creativity of both form and content. He really is one of the most interesting directors working today.

Michael Smiley is in three of Wheatley’s four films and is terrific in all of them. I came across the film Outpost while looking though a list of Smiley's films. It sounded like it might have undead Nazis, so I added it to the queue and watched it last night. Smiley has a secondary part behind Ray Stevenson, who I also like. (And by the way, the more British TV and film I watch the more I notice that they have maybe 20 actors over there, and it’s fortunate that they’re good actors because you see one or two of them in every production.) It is the only film directed so far by Steve Barker and it was only released on DVD in the States. The DVD only thing isn’t always such a bad sign, I find, with lower budget films like this – maybe because distribution and marketing costs are so high? I’m speculating, but I’ve seen much worse films in the theaters.

In Outpost, a businessman named Hunt hires a team of mercenaries, led by Stevenson, to guide him to an old Nazi bunker in an Eastern Europe forest. These Nazis, it turns out, were exploring the dark arts and melding it with twisted steampunk technology. There’s an endless roster of films and comic books where Nazis are associated with the mystical or the occult, including Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, of course, as well as The Keep and Hellboy. I particularly like the charming Norwegian comic horror Nazi zombie film Dead Snow. Outpost has the Nazis experimenting with unified field theory (it references the apocryphal Philadelphia Experiment) and the bad guys, when they show up, are pretty bad. Director Barker uses some interesting animation and the setting is effectively creepy. He makes good use of his budget and the seams don’t show much. The acting’s good except for Richard Brake’s mysterious outback Appalachian cockney accent. Overall, forgettable but a fun and atmospheric 90 minutes.

A maybe better Nazi horror film

So far, I’m 0/2 on new horror films this month. Neither has been terrible but neither is a great discovery, either. I hope things look up.

Daily Halloween: Night 2

I was excited to see Ti West’s The Sacrament show up on Netflix streaming a few weeks ago. His early Trigger Man (2007) was an efficient, stripped down, effective film. I loved House of the Devil and The Innkeepers. He’s a good writer, has an excellent eye, and is known for slowly building tension and then blowing it up with intense action late in the film. (The term “slow burn” has been so often applied to his work that he’s apparently annoyed with it; seriously, google it and his name and you’ll see). Ti West wrote and directed The Sacrament, Amy Semeitz and Joe Swanberg get top billing but AJ Bowen has at least as much screen time. Semeitz and Swanberg are two of the most prolific young filmmakers/actors in indie film and West is no slouch either.

As excited as I was, I saved this film for October. And now I’ve seen it and I am sadly underwhelmed. It follows a reporter, a cameraman, and a photographer (all ostensibly from Vice magazine, in a weird media synergy) who travel to a remote compound to check on, and maybe rescue, the photographer’s sister (Seimetz) from a possible cult. The Sacrament looks good and is competently constructed, building tension and dread (as we expect from West). But the film ends up being far too conventional. Except for the presence of the crew and some grisly shocks at the end, it might as well be a Jim Jones docudrama. No twists, no surprises, nothing to make it stand out.

Very disappointing. So disappointing, in fact, that I stopped the credits and promptly played House ofthe Devil, which I hadn’t seen since it came out on video. It’s so indebted to 80’s occult horror – music, hair, costumes, the grainy look of the film, the walkman dancing – that it straddles the fence between homage and caricature. But it’s made with love and gets every bit right. This one burns so slowly that it has its detractors, but I find it kind of beautiful.

1980's Greta Gerwig