Made From Ingredients From The USA, Canada and Indonesia: V/H/S 2 (2013)

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/94/V-H-S-2_Poster.jpg

Dirs. Simon Barrett, Jason Eisener, Gareth Evans, Gregg Hale, Eduardo Sánchez, Timo Tjahjanto and Adam Wingard

Like a beautiful coincidence, I cover the original V/H/S (2012) months earlier, and like this sequel's release in Britain, you get V/H/S 2 the same year near Halloween. How many franchises get both the prequel and sequel debuting in the UK in the exact same year to each other? There is a slight caveat to the words "beautiful" though. The original V/H/S wasn't a good anthology film. Set around a mysterious series of VHS tapes found in a house, a Wunderkammer of death or an atrocity exhibition, the first film in hindsight was the creation of directors who clearly wanted to make dramas than horror shorts for the most part, and barring one legitimately good segment, none of them were good at the drama in their work either. They dangerously became films that symbolised some kind of elite club of white, middle class, male twenty something horror fans rather than horror shorts for everyone; if the grindhouse phenomenon has (thankfully) died on its backside, its unfortunately been surpassed by a vocabulary of mostly swearing, quasi-drama with no interest and power dimensions amongst peers that really didn't need to have been fed by accident with V/H/S 1. It was a nostalgia for a format (VHS) without considering the potential mysteries of the object in question, and with no real sense of atmosphere and tone, a bane on the genre's existence that has frankly sabotaged it for decades long before I was even born. 

Harsh words, very harsh words, but while I have suddenly become enamoured with this new era of anthology films, at the moment like giving bloodied candy to a four year old, the first film was the one blot when its sequel and The ABCs of Death (2012), for their flaws, had been enjoyable in their fragments, and for both showing potential new talent and even bringing back interest in directors I was cold to. V/H/S 2 can still be criticised for many things, and is as much as an all men's club frankly, in an era where one would hope for more female horror directors to exist, but it's still a drastic improvement on the original. No longer, thankfully, preoccupied with evil women as the segments in the first did barring that one good one which skewered the notion. While still wadding in violence, some sex and general misanthropy, it's for more inventive and trying to do something generally interesting in all the key segments. And, aside from returning contributors Simon Wingard and Simon Barrett,  you've got clear outsiders with different ideas now to bring to the table. A Canadian Jason Eisener, whose work with Hobo With A Shotgun (2011) and his short Youngbuck for The ABCs of Death is that of someone obsessed with visual style and bouncing off the walls in his anarchic tendencies. Eduardo Sánchez, co-directing with Gregg Hale in one of the two contributions done by a duo, one of the directors of The Blair Witch Project (1999), the beginning, legitimately, of the found footage subgenre that this anthology is part of, the drastic shift from that film to a decade or so later adding a potentially fascinating layer to Sánchez's contribution. And finally, expanding the film beyond North American soil, there is the pairing of Indonesian director Timo Tjahjanto and British director Gareth Evans, the later significantly known for martial arts action cinema, not horror, and bringing a drastically different perspective to the material because of this.

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Tape 49 (Dir. Simon Barrett) - V/H/S 2 needs some suspension of disbelief to make it work fully. This is not a criticism at all, as most films need one aspect, or a couple, that need to be accepted as they are. That's the nature of fiction, and of cinema. But it has to be bared in mind, all these occult and supernatural events put on videotapes, with some of the events composed of more than one camera, all existing in the same world as two private detectives search for a young man. They instead find an abandoned house full of these tapes and one of them watch them to figure out what's going on. It's fascinating to imaging whole worlds within one bigger one, subjectively questioned by the film without it realising it, all of which may have more disturbing effects on a viewer than showing mere gristly demises. As the wraparound story that bookmarks the four key segments, its vastly superior to the one in the first film because it actually makes sense. The first one was a clusterfunk of bad pacing and editing, while this actually has a pace. It's the weakest piece alongside Adam Wingard's, the directors alumni of the prequel pointedly, but it at least fits the improved quality of this sequel by being interesting to view. What brief titbits it has about the meaning of these tapes' existence is tantalising this time as well; I hope if V/H/S 3 ever happens it suddenly turns into Videodrome (1983) in the implications made here. Brian O'Blivion would be proud of the idea this nudges towards, but just needs the final push if another sequel is made.

From http://cdn.bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/V-H-S-2_Naked_Chubby_Banner_6_3_13-726x248.jpg

Phase I Clinical Trials (Dir. Adam Wingard) - A man (the director himself) is given a robotic eye transplant, with recording equipment inside it for the creators to monitor its functions, only to find that he can see things with malevolent tendencies he didn't see before. The reason this is the weakest of the key segments is because its difficult to write a lot about it. It's a supernatural story reminiscent of The Eye (2002) but with a very short length, cutting it down to a basic structure, and a gimmick of being recorded from an eye in a quasi-Enter The Void (2009) first person. But it's still a higher quality work than almost all the shorts from the first film. It raises the interesting question of how someone got hold of the footage in the first place, an enticing what-if rather than a logical flaw. It's fascinating for a film in this anthology to be seen through a person's eye. It also starts the greatest virtue of V/H/S 2 - that it takes advantage of two key aspects of the found footage genre and uses both well. That they're filmed on various video recording devices, and that, when done properly, it's very kinetic and all about movement. None of the segments are mindless shaky camera, with even the chaotic moments where the image is incomprehensible being appropriate for the moment. It's far from perfect, and you will raise your eyebrows at the sex scene that suddenly happens, verging close to the same questionable, laddish mentality of the first V/H/S film your dread even if you would find it titillating in a perverse way, any potential eroticism undercut by the fact that, frankly, it's an excuse for nudity without just admitting its an erotic moment and objectifying the actress for no justifiable excuse in the context. But it's a good start to lead to better shorts, ending well in a panicked state, with an interesting idea, leading on to segments which are superior with running with these ideas that can top it easily.

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A Ride In The Park (Dirs. Eduardo Sánchez and Gregg Hale) - A male mountain biking aficionado straps a head-mounted camera on and goes to record a morning bike trek in the local woodland park. Unfortunately he rides into a zombie outbreak. What happens is a really clever take on such a tired subgenre, the zombie film, as he is bitten and becomes a member of the undead, shown through improv zombie-cam. It's great to see one of the founders of the found footage subgenre, and a producer of said original film, bringing something very interesting here in such a simple thought, one that someone would come up with while drinking one night and be amused by it.  In fact it may actually be superior to the more acclaimed segment Safe Haven for the amount of emotions that the premise suddenly holds when its presented as well as it is here. How curiously charming it is to see the world from the shuffling dead, almost like flesh eating newborns who, in a nice touch, will chew on anything before they figure out what they're supposed to sustain themselves on. How a victim, as they're being eaten, will suddenly become undead and the attackers suddenly stop and welcome them in the horde, wandering off together. How hilarious the film gets in a sick way even when the zombies get to a birthday party, the use of various camera, while a leap in logic too, helping the film significantly in tension. And also how deeply sad by the climax the story becomes and how it plays out. All these emotions co-exist in the same minute within the film too, forcing you to feel them all together for maximum effect. It's short, its succinct, but brilliant for it.

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Safe Haven (Dirs. Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Evans)- The biggie. The short everyone talks about in this anthology. The centrepiece in its longer length and bombast. Set in Indonesia, a group of filmmakers manage to get inside the home of a controversial cult to interview their leader, dubbed only as Father, and let him speak on his own terms about their beliefs without opposition. In the middle of the interview, a bell rings and Hell on Earth tales place. It's the most maniac, insane, and downright violent of all the segments, but it's also incredibly complicated in structure. It has numerous camera the footage is recorded from, all that needs to be co-ordinated so the viewer gets what it going on, and doesn't get to know everything at the same time, before and during the chaos; and for all the madness that takes place, it's also as much a story about the filmmakers too, while simplistic, where there's conflict and a strained relationship in their camp which turns the final act into more darker implications. I have seen only one film from each director who made this, and while I am very open to them now, those two works weren't good. Evans is famous for The Raid (2011), but for its visceral fight scenes and their craft, its completely bland in the ideas it actually has. Tjahjanto I know of only from his few minutes long contribution to The ABCs of Death, L Is For Libido, a potentially interesting piece, very well made, that becomes pointlessly shocking for the sake of shock value, almost becoming silly when it tries to cram as many taboos as it can into its short length. There is a possibility, on another viewing, that this ridiculousness was actually a really clever, unexpected moment of self consciousness from Tjahjanto as a horror director who realises the perversity of upping the disgusting sakes for viewers mentally masturbating over it, but it'll have to wait until rewatching that piece to see if I change my mind on it. As a duo thought, I want to wager they cancelled out the other's flaws. Evans pulling Tjahjanto back from pointless gruel, but Tjahjanto getting Evans to try to create something very interesting. It's been seen before in terms of the ideas of the short, and may be pointlessly twisted at times, but Safe Haven is a gem because it's clear in its goal, and baring some disappointingly obvious CGI, works. It could be off-putting in content or how it uses very well used clichés in horror cinema, but it never feels pointlessly sick or insipid, and ends on such a high note that, honestly, this should have been the final segment of the four that leads to the wraparound story's own conclusion. And while I am open to these directors now, I think the two should work together more, likely to boost Indonesian genre cinema up again as a pair combining styles.

From http://zanyzacreviews.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/rtyrtrty.jpg

Slumber Party Alien Abduction (Dir. Jason Eisener) - It's unfortunate that Eisener had to follow Safe Haven. His short - the name on the tin says it all, but with a large part of it recorded on a camera attached on a dog's back - should have been between the zombies and Indonesian cults. Its flawed, the second weakest of the key segments, but I admit I have hope for the director. As someone who likes putting works as one single, giant creation of its creator(s), I wish Eisener gets better and better. Hobo With A Shotgun has an ending the annoyingly peters out, but the energy of the first three quarters was so infectious and legitimately daring than tedious in tone like so many neo-grindhouse films. His segment for The ABCs of Death was structured like a politically incorrect music video, which he pulled off perfectly. If there's another flaw with V/H/S 2, all the segments are structured around chaos suddenly taking place. For the most part it failed, but at least the first film has a varied choice of plot structures. But this short's still fun. Still scary when it gets hectic, with strange aliens that clearly hung around a Edvard Munch painting or two, and the premise of making most of the film shot from a dog's perspective, aside from some hijinks early on from the young cast, again takes the kind of premise joked about in a night's trip to the pub but makes it interesting. From the "eyes" of a small dog, looking up at the world, or crawling in the undergrowth outside, you are truly lost in what is going on, which makes it very interesting as a concept short. The result is still impressive even if it's in the wrong place in ordering the segments together.

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Altogether, there are flaws, but this still raising the bar higher than per usual horror films of now. With this and The ABCs of Death, as I've already stated, there is a potentially wonderful phenomenon approaching of genre anthologies like this becoming a subgenre of interest. I still have some reservations admittedly, when directors coasts, or that they spend their time making entries for these anthologies than actually making feature films. But in the subgenre's favour, you cannot rest back on the worst aspects of genre filmmaking - padded plots, workmanlike aesthetics, tired clichéd structures - in such a restricted short length and small budget unless you want to be the one the viewers dub the bad entry in said anthology. It can potentially cut the chaff from these directors so they can improve, and as this film and the upcoming ABCs of Death 2 show, the combination of so many unconventional choices of directors from various generations, nationalities, even not known for making horror films, could make for some interesting combinations. What needs to be done with the subgenre if they're now in vogue, funded by theatre chains, DVD labels, or in this case Bloody Disgusting, creating an interesting ouroboros in horror films and their audiences, is to prevent it from what unfortunately happened with the first V/H/S, a small club whose language is befitting a small clique that bars outsiders and the new perspectives from it. Here at least there were four different nationalities in the director chairs, and even the plot structures are similar, you have people of various areas, including one from outside of horror, nonetheless making a film with a very consistent tone. Leaner with less segments, clearer but replacing the vagueness with material that adds layers to the segments, and a kinetic grace to all the segments in using the cameras mixed with experimentation. It's a shame it has to replicate the obnoxious end credits style of the first film - abrasive music, and a barrage of sex and gore scenes more closer to a thirteen year old boy or two writing the project. The film that preceded it, while still schlocky, was far more interesting than this.

From http://media.sfx.co.uk/files/2013/10/VHS-2-bloody-chair.jpg

Representing Thailand: Shutter (2004)

From http://www.loyvideo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Shutter2004.jpg

Dirs. Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom

To think ten years ago in the noughties, Asian ghost stories in cinema were an obsession for the genre, both in the films made in Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and, with this film, Thailand, and all those English remakes. Ghost stories are still being made, but the trend has passed. I want to claim it was when The Eye remake (2008) with Jessica Alba vanishes from our consciousnesses after its cinema release, but even as the remake fad of those films finally died out there were still remnants being wringed out. If I'm permitted to reference old podcasts I listen to again, paying lip service to Mondo Movies for another time, I'm reminded of how one of the presenters said these films eventually descended down into random objects being possessed by evil than actual tension - "eck, it's in the walls!", "No, it's in the water!", "Oh, it's in my eyes!". Unfortunately Shutter, with its camera motif, doesn't provide evidence against this point in its existence.

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One night a couple, a man and woman, believe they've ran over a woman on a night-time drive home from a celebration. When its revealed that no one has been found afterwards, it becomes clear that the boyfriend is being haunted by a ghost of a young woman who keeps appearing in photographs. As it continues, this haunting reveals more of him than his girlfriend ever knew. For Western viewers, this type of horror cinema began with Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998), a great start for the boom that begun. It was very much of its home country and of Asia. Unlike the West where religion has dipped in social influence and ghosts are an abstract idea, or in programmes where people sit in dark rooms about to scream when they feel the wind on their shoulders, spirituality is still significant and spirits of the dead still linger with those mortally alive. But it could be understood easily in the West regardless - ghosts are still scary even if we only view them through cable TV programming - and could be remade as PG-13 material for the ticket money of young adolescents. But Ringu is not a succession of jump scares tied around somewhat of a plot. It was mood, oppressive dank atmosphere, sombre drama which, when it went to the horror scenes, chilled the spine, the idea of the dead being on your mind for your ordinary lives disturbing when you encounter a malevolent ones. Shutter is from another country, Thailand, with its own cultural marks on it, but that doesn't excuse that its only sense of horror is a succession of uninteresting jump scares, a flaw that is understandable in any language.

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It suggests something interesting, like many films, that when you investigate past the surface, behind the bookshelf or in certain images, you will see secrets of another person you never considered being tangible with them. This film even juggles having a segment with a paranormal magazine that doctors fake ghost photographs with a conceit suggesting certain types of photos will be always legitimate. But Shutter is such a dull film. The story, full of dark secrets, is not interesting, and being scary is not possible when you do jump scares continually and use obvious ones repeated from other movies. Neither does it help that, if you are not engaged with a film, the mechanism of a jump scare, pulling you in them making you jump, doesn't work then on that viewer. Neither does it look visually interesting for a ghost story like this to work. Shutter ultimately contributes nothing of real interesting beyond the basics and maybe a joke that suddenly happens in a men's bathroom. No oppressive mood, no cultural details aside from a scrap of things, nothing that distresses or creeps you out. It's an average rollercoaster wrapped around an uninspired mortality drama, even squandering the photography idea it carries in its potential. Shutter was only made in 2004, but suggests this subgenre was already in danger of falling back into obscurity that early on. 

From http://horrorsnotdead.com/wpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/shutter-32.jpg

Representing Australia: Lake Mungo (2008)

From http://www.impawards.com/2010/posters/lake_mungo_ver2_xlg.jpg

Dir. Joel Anderson

Told as a documentary, Lake Mungo is the story of the disappearance of a sixteen year old girl named Alice, her family coping badly with her loss but, over the next two years, dealing with the possibility that her ghost haunts their home and certain other areas. Using the tropes of the stereotypical documentary found on television - talking head interviews, establishing footage, archival material from the hauntings and slowly discovered events - the story peels away the layers until the truth about Alice' life and her last days alive are revealed. It sounds very interesting. The film reaches something of immense interest when there is more to the story than a mere haunting, the contradictions of a family where members don't reveal things to the others, expectations are not met and new discoveries are found, including an almost mythological or Edgar Allen Poe-like conclusion to the story. But there is a fatal flaw. It may be only a personal one for me as a viewer, but it's a major aesthetics issue that ruins the film. The documentary structure itself.

Fromhttp://thewolfmancometh.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/lake-mungo-movie-film-alice-ghost-woodas.gif

It looks like a lot of documentaries made nowadays on purpose, on cinema screens as well as TV, which is worth praising for accuracy, but this is a bad mistake in terms of cinematic style for Lake Mungo as it continues a side of filmmaking I hate for its laziness. Now if the film had manipulated and scrutinised the style, this would have helped the film immensely, but aside from actual documentaries on cinema itself, which feel more like moving resource books, it is completely insipid for me as a style that has been repeated ad nauseum. Creating it for verisimilitude in this fake documentary was not a good idea. Filmmaker Peter Watkins dubbed this kind of presentation - in editing, use of music, number of shots - the Monoform, a basic structure of audio-media composition repeated continually in most works, a barrage of audio and visuals. It's used in documentaries, sports coverage, the news, many places. Replicated in countless documentaries from talking heads and musical scores that make you feel emotions from the beginning of the work instead gain them yourself, Lake Mungo as a fake documentary replicates it all without ever questioning it in context of its story. For me, you have no time even contemplate anything in the film, no time to think to bring it altogether for yourself, as narration immediately goes into the next interview, no time to illicit emotions of your own because the film's score tries to force you into how it feels you should at that moment. In replicating the real examples of this filmmaking, Lake Mungo becomes a tedious work, where a potentially disturbing and emotionally affecting story is transformed into the kind of supernatural documentary on television that trivialises concepts of death and trauma for cheap emotional pull. Pandering to our desires to feel sadness for others' plights without caring for them once the show ends, not even as fictional characters in a  good drama. It's a potentially meaningful ghost story turned into a trivial piece of (fictitious) tragedy porn, straight jacketed into the format it has. Again, it could have played with the format, especially as this happens in the film with the haunting footage itself, while other films have television formats and made great use of them, but barring the story idea surrounding the titular lake, you are being forced to watch a replication of documentaries with rarely any real soul to them and tiring for me to see.

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Representing South Korea: A Woman After a Killer Butterfly (1978)

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a5/Killer_Butterfly.jpg

Dir. Kim Ki-young

After being tricked into a suicide pact with poisoned juice by a female stranger, a male college student enters a suicidal depression of his own despite surviving, but many things get in his way of a literal closure. The first an old man who refuses to die even when burned alive. The second a two thousand year old woman. The third, the key narrative, a history professor whose specimens of of Mongolian descent may be provided to him from fresh victims, and his daughter who has connections to the suicidal woman in the beginning. Kim Ki-young has been growing in stature, slowly, within the last few years. In the right areas you may know of The Housemaid (1960), his most well known and completely available film so far, and may have actually watched it for free thanks to cinema preservation and Martin Scorsese. The existence of a remake also from Korea also helps, but Ki-young beat the remake bandwagon by reimagining the movie in at least a few more re-adaptations. I can also say proudly, while a DVD release of this would be great, that this review is possible because the Korean Film Archive have placed films like this, difficult to see, legally on YouTube with English subtitles for anyone to watch. It's wonderful, considering the sorry state of availability of many films still, that a cinematic organisation is making a canon of South Korean film history available, all there for me and others to pick through when we find it, and including stuff like Killer Butterfly next to the arthouse dramas.

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Ki-young's film isn't exactly conventional genre fare though. With the growing amount of idiosyncratic, unconventional films making themselves stand out for this year's Halloween 31 For 31, against disappointing, bland or even unfinished movies, Killer Butterfly is just as different. In another's hands this would be a melodramatic mess which drops plotlines all over the place, but with Ki-young, it's both an immensely engaging journey but also all connects together into the central themes. The male student is forced into what is revealed, in an ending just as out-of-the-blue as The Housemaid but set up clearly, to be a crisis in his existence, debating if life is worth it at all. Three things stop him. The first is where one's will, the old man's, refuses to die and refuses to leave him alone. The second, including human livers and sex surrounded by increasingly created pastries (?!), is the potential for life or sacrificial death that he squanders because of either the moral cost or his own life that it would involve. This pulls him into the third, especially the daughter, where he is pushed away from how he wants to snuff his life out, or actually, how he wants to live.

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To achieve this, Ki-young has no issues with using genre tropes with heavy aesthetics. Bright coloured lighting and coloured gels, and distinct decor designs for interior scenes all create a distinct, hyperactive tone for a film which knowingly gets ridiculous in tone. It's very much in touch with lurid b-movie horror and thriller films, but like immensely auteurist works created with one's own determination, it feels like you are swimming through the creator's id. Gender divide and conflict are very much an issue for the director, especially when it gets to the third part, as are sexuality, and the clear themes of death and one's existence. The fact that the three parts do connect together, in the tone of a complete fever dream, is a success for Ki-young being able to make such a tonally bizarre film work on a simplistic level when you understand the wavelength he is on. Once you do, is also becomes apparent that our protagonist is far from likable while yet still understandable decades later now - a miserable, selfish youth who only cares about offing himself, yet aimless in his existence and alone in poverty, eating the same noodles day-in-and-day-out, he understandably suffers from a lack of any progression in his life that can only be shocked out of him when he sees the absurdity and weirdness that death can involve. Even the Professor and his daughter are trapped in themselves, the former through his obsession with historical ethnography of his ancestors, which could make him an accidental accomplice to murder and corpse desecration, and the later by a pact and the fragility of the body that makes this pact grow to an impossible place to abandon. The absurd push in the ending, like The Housemaid's, feels like Ki-young wanted to viewer not to walk out of the cinema with a clear cut conclusion that would close the idea and make them able to ignore it. When the protagonist gets a new lease on life, so should we think about it while admiring such demented imagery the film has. Heady stuff indeed, but to Killer Butterfly's credit, mixing these ideas with lurid genre tropes makes the ideas more significant. Instead of cased in petrifying drama, the oddity of it gets stuck in your mind, and gives the late Ki-young more potent messages, his will like that of the old man still managing to survive through them and the most ridiculously awesome use of a model skeleton you could find in cinema.

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The Curse of Kazuo Umezu (1990)

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Dir. Naoko Omi

There's a surprising lack of horror anime in existence. Even in the golden era of straight-to-video anime in the eighties and nineties, where in most cases it was of higher production quality than TV series and could get away with more adult content, there was a rare amount of them only. Now, with these straight-to-video works, OVAs, sorely missed and needed to be brought back, there's a gap left what can be released. Films are rarely made already, let alone horror ones. TV series have restrictions in content, and even those which have shocked Western viewers like Elfen Lied (2004) were probably censored on broadcast or showed past midnight. Only hentai could get away with more horror related content; its already porn, so aside from certain Japanese laws, you could probably get away with more. Manga is usually where horror thrives, slowly being dripped into the West in bookstores. As for those rare horror anime that do exist, The Curse of Kazuo Umezu is a truly rare one, which I only discovered the existence of within a few weeks. It's not even included in the version I've read of The Anime Encyclopedia by Helen McCarthy and Jonathan Clements, which catalogues every anime ever made from 1917 including all the hentai tapes. Its existence, once released on video in its home country in 1990, meeting it myself in a VHS rip probably taken from a Japanese VHS a Western otaku has acquired and made available, shows how deep the well anime is outside from what its usually labelled as.

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Kazuo Umezu is a well regarded horror manga author. He's apparently obsessed with red and white stripes, which would make passing a barber's shop and a candy cane stand bliss for him, and I confess to having yet to read his work, as most or nearly all of his work is not available in the West at all. This anime consists of two stories over forty five minutes. The first, a schoolgirl suspects that the new transfer student is a female vampire, but thanks to videotape the truth is more horrifying. The second is of a group of schoolgirls going into a haunted house to their peril. The most distinct aspect of the anime, bookended by a mysterious thin narrator/crypt keeper who entices us with morality tales, is the visual look of the anime. Clearly there was an attempt to replicate the style of Umezu's manga, black lines heavily used and very grotesque imagery. It shows in the female characters, if just their eye lashes and eyes, who dominate the entire anime. I cannot help but think of Western influences such as gothic art to maybe even dolls with the look of the anime, more so when showing moments of terror for the characters through excessive use of said black lines. It looks good in terms of design, and the format allows for more nastier material. The first story brings in a freakish level of body horror that the cutesy break between two stories cannot make into a complete joke - think of very, very big teeth. The second story, lots of raspberry jam smeared everywhere.

From http://i4.minus.com/jblxSZqXNvhyss.jpg

In terms of quality in other areas, it's not a great work if I'm completely honest. It's grown on me, but this must be stated. The visual look is distinct, but the actual animation is rudimentary. The obsession with moments where the characters freeze in terror do go on a bit, and the stories are very predictable. In terms of entertainment value, it's about the presentation of what's on screen, not originality, that will be whether you like this anime or not. Interestingly, the stories do occupy themselves with the ideas of seeing something only to live to regret it, curiosity killing the cat literally. The first centres around how a video camera can reveal the truth, pre-empting the obsession with technology's tangibility in Japanese horror, only for it to reveal too much. The second, cut into by the narrator, becomes purposely abstract, reality cut to pieces by going to the wrong place. It even gets a bit dreamlike and also reflective of itself, the main two characters watching horror movies, including one called the Curse of Kazuo Umezu, before they end up investigating the haunted house.

From http://zapodaj.net/images/7c2f99d4811ee.jpg

It's a completely minor work. The technical and plotting failings do undermine it. But it's still fascinating, immensely fascinating. Beginners to anime shouldn't view this first - this is for those looking for the deepest, obscurest cuts of anime or horror, forgotten in history and made unique for this and its appearance. Done in the era of hand drawn animation, it still has a textual quality, despite rudimentary animation, that stands out far more than the plastic sheen of post-2000s work made on computers. Almost carnivalesque in its horror - the subversion of body parts and the body, obsessions with toys - it's encouraging to investigate the author's original work, and despite the failings of it, it has stayed on my mind since seeing it. The rarity of horror anime helps it, but it's a strange beast by itself, its forty five minutes memorable. A layer of eeriness trickles throughout it, emphasised by the likelihood the version I saw was an original Japanese videotape release from 1990, having survived to reappear in some form for someone from a different country, me, to find. Myths, legends, eroticism, body horror, historical and cultural information, even Western and Eastern pop culture seeps throughout a great deal of anime and its animation plates alongside the genres within it. They feel far more rooted in deeper and more interesting influences than a lot of Western animation, where even a minor work like The Curse of Kazuo Umezu has something incredibly distinct despite its predictabilities. And since horror anime is rare, its great to see one that brings something interesting with it instead of fail miserably. 

From http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/xnB1Q8adRa4/hqdefault.jpg

Cinema of the Abstract: Inferno (1980)

From http://wrongsideoftheart.com/wp-content/gallery/posters-i/inferno_poster_02.jpg

Dir. Dario Argento

Italy

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[It’s been a while since this has been added to a “Cinema of the Abstract” review, but for anyone reading this blog for the first time, this is part of a collection of reviews of unconventional and experimental films that I have been housing on my MUBI profile and will continue to expand. The link to it is here.]

From http://brandonfilm.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/inferno-bluecorridor.png

If there was ever a film obsesses with the shape and enclosure of corridors, secret passages hidden in buildings that leads to dark machinations, it is Dario Argento’s follow-up to his legendary film Suspiria (1977). The characters can only follow along in this film’s locations, a hotel with numerous connecting pipes and air pockets that allow voices to be heard in varying rooms, libraries with rooms full of bubbling pots of viscous liquid, places which show more and more but shrink the presence of the individual within them against everything they encounter. With this film, Argento himself expanded the tone and content of Suspiria by expanding the mythology. With Inferno you have the Three Mothers introduced, three witches of immense evil. The Mother of Sighs, depicted in Suspiria, the Mother of Tears, who is in this film but is devoted to completely in the 2007 film that turned this series of films into a trilogy, and the Mother of Darkness, who is centre to Inferno. Inferno is a mood piece, which caught me off guard on the first viewing even though I had come to expect this sort of tone with Suspiria. It does have a simple story that the film leaps from into this. The information of the Three Mothers’ existence, in old published editions of a diary of the architect who created their homes, is starting to be violently suppressed by the influence of the remaining Mothers, pulling in the brother of a girl who, living in New York, the home of the Mother of Darkness, starts this series of deaths by acquiring a copy of the book.

From http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film3/blu-ray_reviews53/inferno_blu-ray_/large/large_inferno_blu-ray_6x.jpg

Everything that made Suspiria what it was – the atmosphere, the bright coloured lighting, the methodical pace intercut with brutal deaths – is continued in Inferno but it proved to be a lesser known, even divisive, continuation, probably because it strips the plotting down to its minimum on purpose, and more significantly splits up the film into segments following different characters. On a first viewing, you will not know what to expect with Inferno, especially when individual unexpectedly die. In Suspiria there was a clear protagonist, but here it is the expansion of the mythology which is central to the film and how it is violently discovered is the driving force for everything around it. On this viewing, this presentation was perfect, Dario Argento playing with the tropes of this area of gothic horror while letting himself have the most bravado moments in his filmography in terms of content. Everything is to a high standard – the camera movements he used, the colour lighting and set design, Keith Emerson’s score – and presents numerous moments that are instantly memorable. It’s hard to top this film’s most well known scene that is the first set piece, of a room underwater presented to the screen in a way that is strangely calming before the punch line to it takes place, but the film’s supernatural atmosphere increases as it goes along and the film’s various strands are cut to down to the final reveal of who the Mother of Darkness truly is. A lot of what is Argento’s virtue, which I criminally ignored, is how much his excess style is a stronger foundation for his filmmaking to rest upon than one takes for granted. His seventies and eighties output in hindsight is deliberately unconventional, and a lot better written than people have presumed it to be if it is viewed as a jumping off point for his to craft images from. He is very much a director who explains everything through images unless it’s a giallo mystery story or a key plot point he couldn’t have shown through said images. He uses a simple premise or idea, and expands it through the images and music. The final film onscreen is an intense, haunting romp through this area of cinema.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIx-xYiK6j56iZRL0-_h8uAhDYGb7paMRmXf1Gbmscr-e1fl5QhjEfvbZPOwrrcwl4KEuUm2BYOl925ye8S1KoJDicONJNlHPL98TQjKQFBH5liu4K9EaCYyZYgKWo9H_76V8-IzbzPiyD/s1600/Inferno+(22).jpg

These thoughts apply to all of the films of his I’ve rewatched this year as well, finally *getting* the virtues of his work at their fullest. There’s not more I can actually say than to request all of you reading this review to watch Inferno. If you’re cold on it and haven’t watched it in a while, try rewatching it again with these words in mind.

From http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film3/blu-ray_reviews52/inferno_blu-ray_argento_/large/large_inferno_blu-ray_8x.jpg

(No Longer A) Mini-Review: Pitfall (1962)

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_QHH4jeoxHfA/Sh51eRCWQQI/
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Dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara

Japan

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_-9rNLVc8IZ4/SHaWMVxXsnI/
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Pitfall is a fitting follow-up from Death Laid An Egg (1968), two political films with abstract tones. But Pitfall’s politics, set within miner’s strikes and evoking the post WWII political strife of Japan, is more upfront, and while Death Laid An Egg is a testament to technical skill and unconventional editing, Pitfall is a completely lyrical piece. A man is killed by an unknown male dressed completely in white, watching on at everything that takes places as a newly born ghost and wanting to know why he was murdered. In ninety minutes, the debut of Hiroshi Teshigahara manages to develop a full, fascinating narrative whose mysterious tone, questions left unanswered, makes it more compelling and emphasises a bitter political commentary that can be seen within its allegory. But Pitfall is more than this, to be expected from a director whose next film after this was Woman In The Dunes (1964).

From http://aleprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/vlcsnap-233795.png

For the most part, even at its goriest, perverted and questionable, Japanese cinema is calmer, considered and methodical in tone than their Western counterparts, the sense of contemplation emphasised in Buddhist and Shinto belief, as well as their other types of art, explicitly practiced. Even the exceptions, like director Shinya Tsukamoto, have embraced this tone for certain works when it seems appropriate, even melding it with the contrasting, more violently toned mood within the same film. Pitfall is as much about its visual and audio texture as its content. Teshigahara’s film, shot in deep focus, rich monochrome, is of sweat, blood, grains of sand or mud, the sodden shirts and skin of the characters in the hot sun festishistic and yet real, showing layers to human beings physically we take for granted. The story’s ominous tone, written by Kôbô Abe, is emphasised by this aesthetic of liquids and substances, natural or not, being graphically lensed, the murder that pushes the film into its more supernatural territory having a more impactful tone for the mess created to the participants and the pond land it takes place in. Even in animation, Japan and its countless artists have emphasised the small details of life like this, from the famous rainfall of Seven Samurai (1954) to their obsession with cicadas and their noisy cries, offering a view of terrain, natural or manmade, that pushes the cinematic image further than films made in other countries. This methodical, contemplative tone causes you to think about the content more and gives it greater impact on the viewer. It is filtered through a percussion heavy, unconventional score by Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yuji Takahashi and Tôru Takemitsu that is comparable to Death Laid An Egg. In contrast to Guilio Questi’s film though – a Godardian genre piece steeped in baroque gestures and chique aesthetics – the score set over the naturalistic, supernatural Pitfall is more gradual, less tense and underscoring the mood rather than about to break out in frenzies compared to Death Laid An Egg, whose score perfectly matches a more lurid take on murder and the noises of hundreds of chickens in a battery farm together. As the ghosts of an abandoned village merely drift along like ethereal mannequins, the ordinary industrial countryside of rock quarries and mines becomes more fantastical, the border between the living and the dead only existing because the ghosts cannot be heard or seen. The actions of the mysterious man in white, and what entails, evokes a scathing damnation of how the Japanese public may have been treated by their government, a message like with Death Laid An Egg’s that is more potent in this current recession, while also still being the machinations beyond such petty reality, white the colour of death in Eastern culture and the man comparable to Death itself in his on-looking nature.

From http://ishootthepictures.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/vlcsnap-2010-08-07-22h50m06s192.png

I have only seen two of Teshigahara’s films, already mentioned by title in this review. There is still The Face of Another (1966), science fiction on the concept of identity, his later work, and a visual essay-like documentary on the work of architect Antonio Gaudí. I want to see them all. Once Pitfall was a mere curio from the British DVD company Masters of Cinema, unfortunately so out of print now it sells for silly money; now it’s far and away more necessary and greater in its slight but rich ninety minutes than more known films. On rewatches you realised how lucky you were to have watched some films for the first time many years ago, even when you hated them then, and like fine wine, some like Pitfall become superior to others in every way. You realise what you ingested with your eyes and ears back then, when you couldn’t even appreciate a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie properly as an adolescent let along a complex, lyrical film like this, and enjoy it while being grateful for being older, even in your early twenties, to be able to appreciate it now. 

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/pitfall/w448/pitfall.jpg?1303920806