Thirst (2009) – Korean Gothic Horror Underpinned By Psychological Drama and Literary Naturalism

Old Boy director Chan-wook Park gives the vampire genre a brand new twist. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a vampire movie this much in a long time. Not a sparkle in sight!

“This is a violent, visceral, gory, deeply carnal and deeply philosophical vampire movie, if you can picture such a thing. It is beautifully rendered too, and everything from the weekly majong games at Lady Ra’s to the straggling camp of believers that pray for a laying on of hands from the martyr-priest-vampire is thought-provoking as well as visually pleasing.”

Read the rest of my review here: THIRST

Stake Land Review

Just to change things up a little…

My latest review of the vampire movie Stake Land (2010) by Jim Mickle can be found and read at Cinema Sentries.

Check it out here:

http://cinemasentries.com/

Teaser:

In a parallel and immediate now, disaster strikes and a pandemic hits the world. Vampires take over, for any given value of that when they actually don’t retain any higher brain function other than the basic predator-feeding instinct. That does not mean they are not extremely dangerous, because they certainly are.

Mule

And on The Topic of the End of the World…

T.S. Eliot put it best in his poem “The Hollow Men”

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I feel the need to amend myself for the previous post about the post-apocalyptic world of The Book of Eli. There’s a lot more to that story than I first indicated, such as the plucky young female side-kick Solara and the dirty western frontier feeling of Carnegie’s town and the fact that Eli is the book, embodies it, carries it within himself, cradled close to his heart. And the fact that people eat each other is just icing on the cake. Uhm. Well, maybe not icing. Well, strange icing then.

There are all kinds of post-apocalyptic landscapes. There’s excess and decay in Blade Runner (1984), a world where there is too much of everything but it’s all broken down and at odds with the high level of technological advancement. There’s the same general sense of too much stuff and an increasing level of urban ruins in Split Second (1992) where the futuristic London looks more like Venice, complete with rain and rising water levels. Hardware (1990) is post nuclear in the same way as The Book of Eli (2009), but here there’s an interesting mix of blasted wastelands and excess and changed climate. Technology features heavily in that movie as well, and it’s the same kind of retrofitted architecture in a dying structure where the difference between ghetto and high-end living are slim to none, merely depending on weather the technology works or not.

The future of the whole Terminator-series is blasted landscapes, ruins and dangers and technology gone rogue. It’s mostly a hostile environment, more fitted for machines than humans.
Mad Max (1979) had that same blasted desert feel to it even if it was still basically a revenge tale. And the following movies in that series had their merits and flaws. It’s still a forerunner in its genre, no matter what you might think of the leading actor today.

“If the future isn’t bright at least it’s colorful” Blixa Bargeld sings in one of Einstürzende Neubauten’s songs. That certainly applies to the movies mentioned above.

In Equilibrium (2002) the world still works, but things are not the way they should be. Just like with 1984 (1956 and again in 1984) things are bad, but the pressure is concentrated to the psychological realm in a totalitarian structure where you actually can’t argue that things aren’t what they should be, that the future isn’t a bright, clean and shiny place. These aren’t post-apocalyptic worlds in the same sense, they are dystopias, but there’s more to it than that. Reasons why aren’t always given, but the viewer can infer. And does, at least if they’re constructed like this viewer. You can argue where the line between post-apocalypse and dystopia should be drawn, but sometimes they are one and the same and sometimes they teeter-totter back and forth across that line.

There are plenty of post-apocalyptic scenarios that involve some kind of plague or bio-warfare, touching on our paranoia about diseases. Pandemic outbreaks of vampirism as in Daybreakers (2009) or I Am Legend (2007) or, tangentially, The Omega Man (1971) or any of the droves of zombie-movies, starting with the George Romero movies go at the topic slightly differently. The Last man on Earth (1964) combines vampirism, viruses and what-not. And David Cronenberg’s inimitable Rabid (1977) that creeps in under your skin for more reasons than one.

The premise is basically that everything else is the same, but the people needed to keep society going are the broken part of the machine, with the exception of small pockets of survivors. 28 Days Later… (2002) give us the modern view of the virus spreading in a world where communication and travel have developed to the point where pandemics are moving at epic speeds. Then there’s Twelve Monkeys (1995) of course, which is all of these things, decay and viruses and time travel and a hallucinatory drift in the fabric of reality with a cherry on top.

Planet of the Apes (1984) is of course another time-honoured classic that deserves a mention. Nothing’s really wrong here if you don’t take the fact that the human race managed to bomb themselves into the stone age proving themselves to be nothing more than an interesting footnote in history, reduced to myth at best. It’s that old fear of degeneration, a reversed Darwinian evolutionary curve making us irrelevant, which is something that not even Matrix (1999) took all the way. At least there humans serve some kind of utilitarian purpose, even if it’s not that great from our perspective.

Then there’s a lot of … uhm, let’s call them less successful movies on the same basic topic, like Interzone (1987), the storyline of which is given in haiku-style as “Humans fight mutants in a post-holocaust world.” Hmm… I haven’t seen that one. A Boy and His Dog (1975) I have seen, but I can’t exactly claim to have any interesting memories of it, apart from thinking that the sound quality was really bad and the voice-over of the Dog just felt incredibly wrong.

We bring it on ourselves.
That is surprisingly often the moral lesson in these narratives. It doesn’t matter if we are pawns in the game or victims of chance or just caught in the maelstrom of circumstance that are outside our control.

Our fears are pretty much the usual ones. Things ending badly, for whatever reason, are often brought about by greed and stupidity and all the things connected to excess and any of a variation of combinations of the seven deadly sins. Sometimes the humans in these narratives are like cockroaches, surviving despite of it all. Sometimes they are righteous men in a bleak free-for-all where people who eat people are the luckiest people in the world.

Mule

Land of the Dead – Zombies of The World, Unite

Article first published as Movie Review: Land of the Dead – Zombies of the World, Unite on Blogcritics.

It’s a brave new world out there in George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005). There are zombies everywhere, the living are the new minority. The living have built themselves a walled city to better be able to defend themselves against the hoards of the undead.

Zombies come in all shapes and sizes, as anyone who is even vaguely familiar with the genre are well aware of. These zombies start out as the good old-fashioned kind. They shuffle forth, looking for something to feed on, but they neither fast, nor organized. Like most zombies they can infect the living through their bite and once they’ve brought down a living human they tend to overwhelm and devour them, rending flesh from bone in no time at all.

The living are forced to forage outside their walled communities, as in all good post apocalyptic scenarios and there are teams of mercenary soldier types who take care of that. There is also a very hierarchical structure within the walled city, where only the really affluent can live well, in a skyscraper that is a cross between a mall and a luxury hotel. The ordinary folks live in ghetto-like circumstance.

Our main protagonist is Riley Denbo (Simon Baker), one of the foragers, his companion Charlie (Robert Joy) a savant with a special talent for fancy shooting. They work with Cholo (John Leguizamo) who is frankly not a very nice person and they work for Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) who is down-right unpleasant. Kaufman is the king in this little hierarchy, the boss at the top of the skyscraper who never actually has to get his hands dirty.

The zombies start out as brainless as ever in this tale, but they suddenly begin developing the ability to work together under the ”leadership” of Big Daddy (Eugene Clark). They are mindlessly fascinated with fireworks and stand around going “arrrgh” up ’til that point. Not that they aren’t plenty dangerous enough when they get hungry.

Once the zombies start to organise they attack the walled city and all the high and mighties get their comeuppance, as you might expect. That, and a story line about an enormous tank nicknamed ”Dead Reckoning” is what keeps this narrative moving forward, but forget all that for now. Forget Dennis Hopper looking sharp in a nice suit and the entertainment in the pit where you throw a live girl in with two zombies to see who can eat her first.

This is all about the zombies. You have to have a particular love for zombies to enjoy a movie like this. There are so many of them and they are all lovely, they really are. You have to be able to enjoy the lingering close-up of the tableaux created by sweeping a camera along with a flashlight over a group of zombies feeding on soldiers that they have brought down. Much tearing and rending of flesh ensues.

Romero is the granddaddy of this kind of zombie movie with his classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985). There is really no one who does it better. This is gore and blood and guts. There is a thin veneer of social commentary, which keeps the film students happy, but mostly it’s about what you can do with effects and fake blood. Romero makes sure that the camera slowly and lovingly tracks how someone gets their intestines pulled out of their chest cavity and gnawed on.

If you like that, and spunky female characters – big props to Asia Argento (Slack) and Joanne Boland (Pretty Boy)- and much shuffling in the shadows of zombies about to grab and eat you, you should be plenty entertained by this.

Me? I like a zombie-movie that gives good ”raahhh”. And this one definitely does. Dennis Hooper as a thoroughly unsympathetic Rumsfeldian bad-ass is just the icing on the cake.

Land of the Dead (2005) directed by George A. Romero stars Simon Baker (Riley Denbo), John Leguizamo (Cholo DeMora), Dennis Hopper (Kaufman), Asia Argento (Slack), Robert Joy (Charlie), Eugene Clark (Big Daddy), Joanne Boland (Pretty Boy), Tony Nappo (Foxy), Jennifer Baxter (Number 9), Boyd Banks (Butcher), Maxwell McCabe-Lokos (Mouse) and Pedro Miguel Arce (Pillsbury).

Daybreakers – It’s a vampire’s world

Article first published as Movie Review: Daybreakers – It’s A Vampire’s World on Blogcritics.

Most vampire movies try to find a new approach to the subject, with varying results. Some keep to the old traditional view of the vampire as a supernatural monster and some incorporate more modern medical theory. Daybreakers falls in the second category. Sort of.

In a not too distant future a pandemic has hit the planet, turning most regular citizens into vampires. You still get infected through blood and biting, but the vampiric condition has become the norm rather than the exception. This means blood is rapidly becoming a commodity that is in short supply. Some humans are kept like cattle in large facilities and their blood is ”harvested”. It’s all done reasonably humanely, the humans aren’t awake for any of this.

Scientists are working on a blood substitute that is supposed to help with the supply and demand problems. The main blood supplier is the Bromley Marks company run by Charles Bromley (Sam Neill). Our main protagonist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is a haematologist hard at work on the task of finding a cure. He is also a reluctant vampire, having been turned by his brother Frankie (Michael Dorman). Frankie works as a human hunter, trying to round up any strays that may still be running around in the daytime.

There are some humans fighting the disease, trying to stay ahead of what is rapidly becoming the rule. These are led by Audrey (Claudia Karvan) and Elvis (Willem Dafoe). Elvis has managed to cure himself from vampirism through an extraordinary set of circumstance that involve a car crash, sunlight and water.

The vampires are starving, which is why the clock is ticking for Edward to find a cure’ as well as for the whole vampire population in terms of survival. If they feed on other vampires, on themselves or on animal blood for too long they turn into a more primal, bat-like creature with a much higher level of aggression. They lose any remnants of humanity through the starvation process and are therefore summarily executed by the government.

There are things about this movie that are really appealing, like the way the world has adapted to night time living and what kind of technological solutions have been worked out to allow the vampires to go about their business during the day. The heavy noir feeling you get from the grey monochromatic life of false daylight and night time life is contrasted by a richly suffused palette for the daytime scenes, which makes it easier to understand why Edward fights his vampire condition so hard.

Evil here is represented by Sam Neill’s character, the large corporation incorporate. He just wants to make money, same as always, and weather he does that by exploiting the last remaining humans or not makes no difference to him. Finding a substitute, or a cure, is never really on his agenda.

There are all kinds of family drama going on as well, Charles’ human daughter Alison (Isabel Lucas) refuses to let herself be turned, and once it’s done forcibly she feeds on herself rather than accepting her ration of blood, which quickly turns her into a monster. Edward and his brother have all kinds of issues to work out, concerning the nature of humanity and which is better – vampire or humankind.

There is however a crux. It may be stylish, and pretty and have aspirations of making comments about society and humanity and inter-human relationships, and it’s even got Willem Defoe and Sam Neill, but it still isn’t a very good movie, even in its genre. It tries to do too much, it works too hard at being cool. It delivers broody shots of Edward’s struggle to remain human one moment and explodes a vampire body in an orgy of blood and splatter the next.

The cure for the vampire disease turns out to be the blood of a vampire who has been turned back into a human. This results in what can best be described as a messy bloodbath at the very end of the movie when starving vampires fall on the re-humanized vampires and tear them apart, only to be turned back themselves and so on and so forth. The disease eats the cure eats the disease and maybe the cure will be pandemic as well, but at a very high price.

I have a thing about vampire movies and could easily draw out all the implications of using blood disease and sickness as a metaphor or a synecdoche, but I never really get involved enough in this particular telling of an old familiar story to think it worth the bother. For all its gore this is a bland and anaemic specimen of the genre. Sadly.

Written and directed by Michael Spierig & Peter Spierig, starring Ethan Hawke (Edward Dalton), Willem Dafofe (Lionel ‘Elvis’ Cormac), Sam Neill (Charles Bromley), Claudia Karvan (Audrey Bennett), Michael Dorman (Frankie Dalton), Isabel Lucas (Alison Bromley), Vince Colosimo (Christopher Caruso).

The Painted Veil – China and Orientalism

The Painted Veil (2006) directed by John Curran is based on a W. Somerset Maugham novel. It stars Edward Norton as the ambitious doctor Walter Fane, Naomi Watts as the socialite Kitty Fane, Liev Schreiber as Charlie Townsend, Toby Jones as Waddington and assorted other actors of Asian decent in various minor parts. I will explain why I put it like that in a little while, so stay with me here.

Now, I’m a fan of Edward Norton. I think he’s done some really first-rate work in his career, and that’s why I will let him get away with the slightly shady English accent here. Naomi Watts, same thing, really, she does a good job – the accent thing shouldn’t pose much of a problem for her. And then we’ve got the show-stealer Tony Jones who is really brilliant in the role of Waddington and the unusually suave performance of Liev Schreiber who I last saw as Sabretooth – so that at least shows that he’s got range.

Maugham’s stories are often quite subtle, they teeter between fine sarcasm and what can loosely be termed romance, though it’s never as simple as that. It’s also about class and appearances and what that does to the human heart. So here we have the passionate and taciturn doctor Fane who falls for a bored socialite and manages to get her to marry him. It’s obviously an infatuation on his part and a social necessity on hers. He takes her to Shanghai where she promptly has an affair with the cad Townsend. She gets caught out and is given an option – which is really no option at all. If she gets Townsend to agree to divorcing his wife and marrying her instead Fane won’t cause a scandal by citing adultery as the cause for the divorce. Townsend has never had any intention of divorcing his wife. Kitty is trapped and caught and forced to accompany her husband to a provincial Chinese town infested with cholera.

So far so good. All this is what you can expect in terms of keeping up appearances, holding on to archaic values and so on and so forth. Walter punishes Kitty by being cold, disinterested and in general acting like a jilted husband. The fact that they are deep into a foreign county surrounded by the dead and dying makes this little chamber drama more acute.

The scenery is stunning. The shooting locations are actually in Shanghai and the Chinese countryside – spectacular, fantastic, beautiful beyond belief. It’s all … awesome, in the original meaning of the word.

The Fanes are forced back on themselves in this desperate and desolate time and finally they break through to some kind of intimacy and Kitty realises she has to do something with herself – make herself useful in some way, so she involves herself with a local convent run by a hardcore old nun played masterfully by Dame Diana Rigg.

So – Where is the sting in all this honey?
Orientalism, in the good old-fashioned intellectual tradition of Edward Said. This is 1920s China, we’re talking communism, the Cultural Revolution. It strikes me as particularly clumsy that this movie makes no concessions, but sticks to the Maugham view – which is fine for Maugham, but not so much for 2006.

The sundry Chinese characters are treated pretty much like scenery – cute little singing orphans and the occasional mildly threatening young man in the street, the contentious, but obviously a bit stupid guard, the Chinese mistress and Colonel Yu (Anthony Wong) and all in all they’re really not given much space.

Colonel Yu get at least a few good lines in like “I think China belongs to the Chinese people, but the rest of the world seems to disagree.” Which does a little something, but it really does not go even a third of the way on how much richer the story would have been had we been given even a something more than just the British doctor and his ditzy wife swooping in to save the day when the whole cholera epidemic is the fault of the ignorant Chinese peasants burying their dead too close to the main water source and also superstitiously keeping their dead on lit de parade for three days instead of doing the wholesome thing and dumping their bodies at once.

I want to like this movie. I just can’t, despite the scenery, the acting and the pretty of it.

Mule