The New Janitor (1914)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Star: Charlie Chaplin, Jess Dandy, Jack Dillon and Peggy Page

I'm reviewing each of the 36 films Charlie Chaplin made for Keystone Studios in 1914 on the centennial of their original releases. Here's an index to these reviews.

From the distance of a century, we can mostly only guess at what went through Chaplin's mind during his last few months at Keystone but we do know some things for sure and others seem like safe guesses. For a start, he was clearly both an ambitious man and a perfectionist, attributes which led his drive to direct his own films. At this point, he had no less than 27 pictures already behind him that had generally done better than regular Keystone product. He had also been his only director for a couple of months and was enjoying the learning process. Each new short during this period seems to highlight how he nailed down a new technique, to build on with the next. The Masquerader, three pictures earlier, was by far the most ambitious film he'd made, allowing him to tell more than one story. With His New Profession, he told his story in more than one location, bouncing around rapidly. The Rounders was an experiment in pacing and The New Janitor combines all those techniques to great effect within the best sets he'd worked on yet.

So Chaplin was moving relentlessly forward, to the degree that this doesn't even feel like a Keystone film or one from 1914. He must have been very aware that he was closing in on the end of his year's contract at the studio too and, as he says in his autobiography, he 'knew the ephemera of it'. In other words, even as his films got better, grander and more consistent, he wasn't counting on any lasting fame, so he asked Mack Sennett for a thousand dollars a week, which his boss pointed out was more than he earned himself as the owner of the studio. Chaplin merely replied that 'the public doesn't line up outside the box-office when your name appears as they do for mine.' Of course, he didn't get it, but Essanay offered him more: $1,250 per week, along with a $10,000 signing bonus, so naturally he jumped ship. This discussion with Sennett appears to have been somewhere in August, meaning that while he was making The New Janitor late in that month, he already knew that he was leaving, even if he didn't know where he was going.

My interpretation of his late 1914 work is that he was learning all he could in preparation for his move to a new studio, whichever it would be. He slowed down to a less frantic and more consistent pace than he had kept throughout the year; both June and August had seen five new Chaplin pictures in theatres, with only one in July, but from this point forward it was two shorts each month, with only one extra in October. Generally speaking, he took longer to make them too, presumably because he could, with a gap between each of them. He still kept a busy schedule, but he was averaging a new picture every two weeks rather than every one, and he wasn't overlapping productions any more. Clearly he wasn't only experimenting with the cinematic toolbox, he was also learning how to produce a picture in a sustainable, professional manner. This progression usually takes new fish years to achieve, but it's somehow appropriate that the madcap factory that was Keystone gave Chaplin the opportunity to do it in only one.

While he devotes little space in his autobiography to his time at Keystone, merely a lone chapter, he does take time to explain something he learned specifically while shooting The New Janitor. As the character of the title, he finds himself at one point fired by the president of the company for which he works, hardly a surprising act given that he's just dumped a bucket of soapy water on him from a dozen floors up in the company skyscraper. 'In pleading with him to take pity on me and let me retain my job,' he explained, 'I started to pantomime appealingly that I had a large family of little children. Although I was enacting mock sentiment, Dorothy Davenport, an old actress, was on the sidelines watching the scene, and during rehearsal I looked up and to my surprise found her in tears. 'I know it's supposed to be funny,' she said, 'but you just make me weep.' She confirmed something I already felt: I had the ability to evoke tears as well as laughter.'' This pantomiming didn't make it into the resulting film, but the feeling did.

What struck me immediately with The New Janitor was the sets, which seem to be much roomier and far more ambitious than I'm used to seeing in Chaplin's Keystone shorts. We start out in the company lobby, with its chequered floor, marble stairs and apparently working lift. The elevator boy, Al St John, is cheeky enough to avoid letting him in, so he walks the twelve flights up to the top floor, which could be the very same set from a slightly different angle, but with the stairs changed. He quickly moves down the corridor outside the executives' offices, with its panelled walls and window to the outside world, then enters one of those offices, with another window and a wall covered with the little drawers that hold cards. Another blink and we're in the president's office, with its prominent safe and a third window. That's five locations in less than two minutes, with different floors, walls and props. That might not seem like much to us, but some of Chaplin's early films never left a single square room.

Of course, these are still clearly sets, the work of the Keystone carpenters commendable but not strong enough for us to buy that we're in a real skyscraper, at least until Charlie almost falls out of the one real window, the one in the president's office. The others are painted, as are the drawers, the panelling and the marbling on the staircases, but it took more work to put it all together, both mentally and physically, than Keystone usually took. The shots of the outside of the building are real, with Chaplin really hanging out of that window; Jeffrey Vance identified it as the Marsh-Strong Building at 9th & Main in Los Angeles, built only a year earlier. John Bengtson, 'the great detective of silent film locations', highlights how close this building is to other locations Chaplin used in other Keystone films, such as His Musical Career, only four films away. This scene is what Vance calls a 'high and dizzy' scene, a couple of years before Harold Lloyd and others would make them popular in comedy films as thrilling as they were comedic.

Once the sets are established, what leaps out are the characters and how they all have a purpose within the script. It's long been suggested that Keystone pictures didn't have scripts at all, just starting points from which to improvise a succession of gags, but that belief was firmly debunked by Simon Louvish's book, Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett, which reprints many of Sennett's scripts. They're hardly traditional scripts with stage directions and dialogue, but they do show how much thought often went into the progression of the stories. I raise this here because I can't remember another picture made at Keystone that screamed so loudly that it had a firmly defined script. Each of the characters is defined, with their own motivations and their own story arcs. Novelist Gini Koch once told me that a writer should be able to imagine their story from the perspective of any of its characters and it's clear that Chaplin set his script up with that sort of idea in mind. He's the lead, but everyone else has their place too.

And there are a few such characters, even if we discount St John's elevator boy, whose part is restricted to forcing Chaplin to use the stairs. There's a villain, one of the company's managers who might work in the office opposite the president's but still owes a lot of money to a bookie. His story arc is established quickly, as the debt is being called in and he only has a day to raise the funds or he'll be exposed. With a safe on the other side of the hallway, it's clear what his direction will be. The president gets to show two sides too, initially a negative one as Charlie accidentally drenches him with the water he's using to wash his windows, but a positive one later on when Charlie comes good during the big holdup scene. Stuck in between is the president's secretary, whose honesty proves to be Charlie's salvation, albeit not because he absentmindedly dusts her backside after the safe. The story couldn't exist without all four characters, but she's the glue that keeps them and their scenes tied together.

Of course, as tends to be the case with the ladies in Keystone pictures, her identity is unclear. IMDb says it's Peggy Page, who Charlie manhandled in His New Profession, and certainly the two actresses look a lot alike. Wikipedia suggests that it's Helen Carruthers, as it did in His New Profession, perhaps because she appeared in so many of Chaplin's Keystone shorts. The BFI claims that Minta Durfee played the part, but it's clearly not her so we can discount that suggestion. Whoever it is, she does her job capably, showing some elegance and charm even before being choked out by the villain, even though she's a second rank player at Keystone like most of the rest of the cast. Her boss and Charlie's is Jess Dandy, who appears in most of Chaplin's films at this point, while the massively experienced Jack Dillon is the thieving manager. He started out in film as early as 1908 and had over a hundred films to his name by this point, albeit with few left to go. So many of these silent actors didn't even get to fail to make the transition to sound.

While The New Janitor can hardly be said to be a sophisticated piece of work today, it was at this point in Chaplin's career. It's less funny than many of his prior films, mostly because the gags refuse to stand in the way of the story and exist to serve it instead. There are some neat ones, such as when Chaplin holds the would be thief at gunpoint by pointing the gun through his own legs while he's bent over double, or when he clambers over his broom when entering the president's office because he apparently can't turn it round; the moments where he nearly falls out of the window are notable too. However, it's much more consistent than his pictures had been up until this moment, lavishly outfitted (at least for Keystone) and thoughtfully constructed. It serves as yet another step forward for Chaplin, in what feels like his cleanest and most progressive picture thus far with one of his more likeable parts. While historically important, it's occasionally difficult to enjoy Chaplin's more primitive pictures, but this one is an easy one to like.

Important Sources:
John Bengtson - Rare Chaplin Scenes in Downtown Los Angeles
Charlie Chaplin - My Autobiography (1964)
Simon Louvish - Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett (2003)
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

The New Janitor can be watched for free at YouTube.

To see the restored versions of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory, it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone. It omits only Her Friend the Bandit, which is considered a lost film, and half of A Thief Catcher, which was previously thought lost but now recovered. The full version debuted in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1.

Kiss of the Damned (2012)

Director: Xan Cassavetes
Stars: Josephine de la Baume, Roxane Mesquida, Milo Ventimiglia, Anna Mouglalis, Michael Rapaport and Riley Keough

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

When you're the daughter of pioneering American indie filmmaker John Cassavetes and his wife, actress Gena Rowlands, anything you do in film is going to bring up that connection. Surely one reason why Xan Cassavetes wrote and directed Kiss of the Damned as her feature debut is because it's as far away from anything her father made as could be imagined. John made exceptionally personal pictures, usually in a cinéma vérité style, that were often uncomfortably realistic, constructed out of grit and sweat and sheer acting ability. This is nothing of the sort, instead being a throwback to the sort of arthouse horror movies that only the Europeans made, auteurs like Jean Rollin, Dario Argento or Jess Franco. Like so many of the films Rollin made, this is mostly style over substance, telling its simple story mostly through visual style, building a dreamy atmosphere out of blood, sex and architecture. Casting mostly European actors helps ensure that it sounds authentic to that approach too.

That's not to say that this would be mistaken for a Rollin picture. While a great deal of care and attention is given to make the film feel older than it is, not through artificial aging but through stylistic choices, the anomalies can't be accidental. The very first shot of Djuna has her firmly occupying two eras, watching a Vittorio de Sica movie from 1953 while working on a modern Apple laptop. Before long, she visits a video rental store apparently entirely stocked with VHS tapes, but she's returning DVDs. Clearly, the message is that the movie is contemporary but consciously made in an old fashioned style. This style is everywhere as the film begins, immediately and deliberately setting down its goalposts. The font used for the title is one borrowed from Rollin's 1979 feature, Fascination, in decadent purple. We're shown still shots of the countryside, as we listen to a calmly pulsing soundtrack that quickly gives way to some Italian prog rock beats, a soft flute and soon just the wind. Whatever else this is, there's no false advertising to be found.

It's also notably sparse on dialogue, as Rollin's movies usually were, like a silent movie with speech, if that apparent contradiction makes sense. When Djuna catches sight of Paolo in the video store, she says nothing but runs outside as if to escape his charm; of course he follows. Forced to a stop as it's pouring with rain, they swap names and we leap forward to a bar. In a rare talky scene, they swap more in depth introductions: he's in isolation to write a script, while she's staying at a friend's house, translating poetry and literature into different languages, as quintessentially European as her French accent suggests. She also explains that she has a skin condition that prevents her from experiencing sunlight. Then it's to her house, where they watch Viridiana silently and get close. This unfolds without a word until she says 'no'. She makes him leave, even though she clearly doesn't want him to go, then cries in the huge bathtub as the camera backs away to leave her be. All the dialogue could have been told in intertitles.

The biggest problem the movie has is the way that we're supposed to buy into pretty much any aspect of Paolo's character. Initially it was his naïveté which annoyed me but soon it became his motivation. All the poor moments early on tie to the characters, who are poorly written, while all the great ones are visual. I loved the look of the piece: the very deliberate lighting choices, whether they're to make a scene lush or stark; the composition of frame, some shots looking rather like old paintings; the fluid camera motion, such as when Djuna floats down the stairs; the choice of camera angles, like when we look down on the pair of prospective lovers devouring themselves through a chained door. Yet I hated the characters: the way that Djuna and Paolo fall both in love and lust with each other at literally first glance; her weakness and his one track mind; the way he refuses to leave, even when every fibre of his being must have been telling him to get the hell away from this lunatic woman.

She even tells him that she's a vampire fifteen minutes into the picture; he doesn't believe her, of course, so she lets him chain her onto the bed so she can't hurt him. We're enjoying the choice of camera angles and motion even as we completely fail to buy into either character's motivations. Naturally, she changes, fangs and bright contacts betraying who she really is. Yet he doesn't leave; he unchains her instead and walks around in slow motion, exuding alpha male power even as he sets himself up completely to be her victim. He pretty clearly bares his throat for her too as they're reaching the moment. 'I would have done anything to be with you,' he tells her, 'however insane.' I presume we're supposed to be feeling the love and the fantasy and the romance of it all, but we're really just trying to figure out why he'd be so foolish. There's thinking with your pecker and there's not walking away from an admittedly gorgeous young lady when you've known her five minutes and she's shedding tears over how she's going to kill you.

What follows is as clichéd as it is stylish. To underline Paolo's naïveté, he apparently has no clue what a vampire is, so Djuna explains it all with not a single surprise on our part. I can appreciate that they don't sparkle, but everything is so utterly traditional that we wonder what Cassavetes is going to bring to the table. Even here, everything we appreciate is visual, like the way we're given scenes so colour saturated that they could be hand tinted black and white. I actually wondered here if none of this was real and we were watching a visualisation of Paolo's writing process, all extrapolated from that one glimpse of Djuna in the video store. Maybe he's writing a vampire movie but doesn't have the imagination for it. I do like the idea that a vampire and a human can fall in love, but you know, maybe there should be a little more build to it than, 'You're cute, please bite me.' There must be a way for them to do lunch first, maybe out under the stars with her conspicuously only drinking a rare vintage of red wine.

Given how cloying and clichéd it had already become, I found myself aching for something new and not just the abstract blur of Paolo's first kill. I wondered if it was finally going to arrive when a new character drives up to the house 27 minutes into the picture. She's Mimi, another French vampire all dressed up in the Sunglasses After Dark aesthetic, in from Amsterdam to stay for a week on her way to a sort of rehab ranch for vampires in Phoenix. 'She's a disturbed creature,' Djuna tells Paolo, 'a crazy freak'. We're ready for the cutesy stuff to get completely shaken up, because if Djuna is the epitome of a romantic vampire, Mimi is clearly the animalistic flipside of the race and there's no chance that they'll peacefully share the same roof for long. While Djuna is elegance, poise and control, Mimi is wild, emotionless and nihilistic. It does bode well for improvement, but sadly, we're only inflicted with an acute bout of bitchy vampire self loathing, which doesn't help the story in the slightest.

There are good moments to come, but bizarrely none of them are tied to any of the characters to which we've been introduced thus far. We've spent half an hour, almost a third of the running time, watching a pair of characters we don't care about wonder if another character we care about even less will cause a problem for them. At this point, I was mostly wondering if I could ask the projectionist to switch to French language and English subtitles. Most of the good moments revolve around Xenia, a vampire actress who owns the house that everyone else is staying in. At least with her we get something new, a neat vampire take on Alcoholics Anonymous because Xenia, like Djuna, feeds on animals rather than people. It's been forty years without a taste of human blood for Xenia and Mimi's 'a disturbed creature', remember? I like that whole sequence, which is as capably and enticingly written as the rest is cheap and clichéd. Up to then, the best part is that Irene, the housekeeper, is safe because she has a rare blood disorder.

The reason I keep harping on about the writing is that it quickly jeopardises the film and eventually sinks it, the ending proving even more dissatisfying than the beginning. What's so frustrating about the writing is that everything else around it is strong, especially the visual aesthetic which nails its goal to replicate the old Rollin feel. It's telling that even the vampire threesome is boring, not because it isn't shot well but because we have so little connection to anything except the camerawork at this point that we just don't care. Mimi is apparently a centuries old creature of the night, a talented predator, but she acts more like a pouty little thirteen year old girl. At points I seriously wondered if I'd blinked during her sparkling scene. If the primary goal Xan Cassavetes had with this film was to make something so utterly unlike her father's work, so as to establish herself as a filmmaker of her own, she succeeded magnificently. He avoided style and delivered substance; here, with Kiss of the Damned, she did the exact opposite.

Play Dead (2012)

Directors: Shade Rupe & Teller
Star: Todd Robbins

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Play Dead is an odd film to see at a film festival, given that it's not really a film at all, it's a filmed record of a stage performance. Now, you might be imagining a teacher sitting at the back of a school hall with a camera on a tripod documenting kids performing their summer play, but this is much more imaginative than that, both as a stage performance and a recording of it. That's not too surprising, given that Teller (of Penn and Teller fame) directed the stage show and co-directed this film version of it with Shade Rupe. However, the same flaw applies equally to this and the school play, namely that we can't interact with a recording. That's by far the biggest problem with this picture, as this stage show featuring magician and carnival showman, Todd Robbins is emphatically a participatory one. It sets up all sorts of gimmickry that is surely a riot for those attending in person, but we're stuck on the other side of the fourth wall so get to merely watch the reactions of those who attended. We can't experience a rollercoaster on television.

Teller is a magician, of course, well known for performances where he explains his tricks at the very same time that he's bamboozling us with them. He's also known for his TV show, Penn & Teller: Bullshit! which allowed the duo to debunk dishonesty wherever they could find it, including in such fields as professional mediums. It's therefore no surprise to find him interested in Robbins's interactive throwback to the 'spook shows of the 1940s' where he does both of those things at once, setting up apparent connections to the spirit world that he then debunks as a carnival trick. Robbins's own background strongly fits the material too. He discovered magic at the age of ten and gradually progressed up through the ranks, but because it wasn't paying the bills he sidestepped into the carnival scene, working in a Coney Island sideshow doing all the old time acts: swallowing swords, hammering nails into his nostrils and eating fire and light bulbs. He kicks off this show by chewing up a light bulb with gusto.

Well, technically he kicks off the show by building up the theatricality of the performance, because we're unable to forget that this is a stage event. His first act is to plunge the entire theatre into darkness, right down to switching off the exit signs. Needless to say, there are young ladies in the audience who scream. Then, to introduce 'an evening of spooky entertainment', he gives audience members the opportunity to leave by turning over an hourglass. Once that runs out, the doors are locked. He wasn't kidding: if you're in, you're in; you don't get to skip out halfway through, whatever happens. We recognise gimmickry like this from William Castle, but he only brought it to cinema from the same spook shows that Robbins took influence from here. The sold out audience at the Players Theatre in Greenwich Village in the last days of the show's run in New York weren't passive observers, they were part of the show itself and locking them in merely ensured that they couldn't forget it.

At this point, Robbins was almost a year into the show. After a couple of weeks of workshop performances in Las Vegas and preview shows in New York, it officially opened off Broadway on 21st October, 2010 and ran until 24th July, 2011. However, it felt like he'd been working it for decades, stalking the stage and the theatre floor like a Satanic car salesman, in complete control of everyone in the audience and everything that might happen either to them or around them. He's a massively talented storyteller, which allows him to keep his audience captivated as he selects an apparently random file box from the stacks of them that provide the stage's backdrop and make it look like a bizarre underground museum. He then explores the history of the character whose effects are kept within it, a character with a strong association with death: child murderers, carnival geeks, fake mediums at society sex parties. Of course, that exploration isn't in the form of merely a lecture, it's a full on participatory experience.

The obvious success of what Robbins does here makes me wonder why these shows no longer pepper the landscape, but that's a wider subject than this review should cover. Sure, the elements that he brings to the stage are time honoured ones: Grand Guignol effects, spook show shenanigans, carnival magic tricks and spiritualistic explorations. Robbins approaches them all from a modern framework though, one that's reminiscent of Penn & Teller but with less of the technical aspect and more of the human connection. The material leaps all over the place in tone, but that only serves to keep the audience on the hop, unsure of where it's going to go next. One moment they're subjected to broad slapstick haunted house humour, the next focused in on poignant remembrance, only for nudity to appear out of nowhere. In less able hands, this would have been problematic, but with Robbins in charge, it's merely another way to emphasise how showmen can manipulate emotion. He does it impeccably even while he's talking about it.

Of course, it can't hurt that he talks about it with a clear voice that doesn't merely cajole and command, it even ventures into Vincent Price impersonation as he introduces some of the dead folk who inhabit his file boxes. Perhaps my favourite part arrives when he adds a new one, an audience member called Alan who writes his names and dates onto one of the boxes. I won't spoil how he bites the big one, because it deserves to wait for you to experience it yourself, so let's just say that it's a brutal and bloody act. What I appreciated most was how Robbins harangues the audience afterwards for their reaction to this heinous murder, given their rather different reaction to an earlier trick in which he apparently devoured a live rat. Everything in this show revolves around faith and how it can be manipulated by people with the will and the talent to do so. This is a show; everyone in the audience knows that Alan is alive somewhere, waiting to be reintroduced, but maybe the rat wasn't a trick. The light bulb wasn't, was it? How about the rat?

I won't spoil the other stories either, because they're also worthy of being experienced, but I will highlight that to do that properly, you really need to go to the show rather than find a way to see this recording of one. If anything, it might be worth seeing the show live, then following up with this film, because there are a few aspects included in this recording that you won't get from the live experience. Most obviously, there are a number of points where the theatre is plunged into complete darkness, not only to allow for Robbins's team to scare the crap out of the audience by cleverly exploiting their fears, but to allow us to witness what's really going on through the use of infra-red cameras. Shade Rupe recorded the show with panache before sending the footage on to Teller who edited it into its final form with the comedian and professional athiest, Emery Emery. Clearly video wouldn't work too well with scenes of utter darkness, so the infra-red approach was a key one to make the project possible.

There is a DVD for Play Dead, because I watched one as a film festival submission but, to the best of my knowledge, it isn't available for sale. I wonder if the goal is to restrict screenings to the festival circuit as an advert for the ongoing live show, perhaps suggesting that this will be released as and when the show ceases to be performed live. It would seem viable that it could be sold after the shows as a souvenir that adds a little extra insight to the experience people had just been through. It would seem that there's not just a show here, there's a message too, one that Harry Houdini gave a century ago. Robbins wants us to know that anyone who claims to communicate with the dead is a liar and a cheat; this show helps him to debunk their tricks by repeating and then exposing them in front of a live audience. That message is one that deserves to be shouted from the hilltops and a DVD would reach a lot more people than would eight shows a week. Given the choice, go see the show rather than the film, but this is a good follow up.

Necromentia (2009)

Director: Pearry Teo
Stars: Chad Grimes, Layton Matthews, Santiago Craig, Zelieann Rivera, Zach Cumer and Cole Braxton

Here's a feature that I've been aching to rewatch because, I have to confess, I slept through much of it at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in 2009. I've fought sleep often at film festivals, where I'm in front of a screen for fifteen hours a day and talking outside for much of the rest, but this is the only time I really succumbed and, finally watching Necromentia afresh, I understand why. This is not a boring movie, by any means, and the sheer freakiness of it has stayed with me; even walking out of the theatre, I knew that this was a film I wanted to watch properly. Yet it's a hallucinatory dream of a picture that unfolds out of order and refuses to let us engage with it directly, preferring us to sit back and let it infiltrate all of our senses at once. Maybe I wasn't asleep, I was in a trance state. Even watching awake, it's tough to grasp everything that's going on until the end credits roll and then it's worth a discussion afterwards to make sure we got it all. I'm still unsure of a few details, but it won't be a hardship to revisit it once more.

Clearly, Pearry Teo wanted to deluge us with nightmarish hallucinations, a more consistent vision of what Clive Barker's work could have been in Hellraiser, if eventually a safer one too. He begins immediately, as the opening credits unfold in a gothic font to the accompaniment of enticing and often forbidden imagery and agreeably layered sound. As the film proper begins, we see much of the same with further montages blistered at us with editing that's so fast that it comes close to shifting into subliminals. Merely blink and you'll miss things you won't see again. The visuals are notably edited in synchronisation with the music, emphasising the experience of it all over the detail. We're shown a monster immediately, flashing in and out so we can't quite take everything in at once, just some conglomeration of muscles, chains and bulk. A man wakes up in an industrial setting, his back covered in bloody symbols, to be harangued by a weird monochrome figure in a gas mask and vaguely medical antique cagework.

We aren't introduced to this strange figure, but the man is Hagen, initially called to by a whispering girl's voice but then harangued in a barrage of words which echo the visual montages, spoken like a demonic throat singer in tones that are both deep and high pitched, as if they're being issued from more than one mouth. 'Elizabeth is dead,' he's informed. 'You were given a choice.' 'Tormented for all eternity.' 'Instead you chose Hell.' By the time we reach, 'You will be punished,' we're shown only blackness. Then we back up to see some of why he's here. Hagen is a strange one too, talking soothingly to a corpse in a bathtub. His glasses are cracked and taped; she has a rictus grin and her hair is starting to fall out. He bathes her anyway and waits patiently for her to return to him. She promised to come back from death, apparently, so only time sits between them now and with it, a routine of 'daily maintenance' to ensure that when she does return, it's as comfortably as possible. Oh yeah, he's more than a few cards short of a full deck.

Now, if this scene wasn't freaky enough, there's a lot going on here to emphasise to us how freaky it's all supposed to be. For a start, it unfolds with a curious colour palette, more yellow and green than it should but with that gangrenous feel somehow appropriate. The metal framework in which he encases her could easily be a home made torture device as much as an amalgam of medical equipment. The camera is an ever-moving thing, rarely staying still even when it's static, as if there's something alive in the air around them. Playing in the background, a little deeper than we expect, is Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, but it sounds more like a music box than a piano and perhaps not entirely at the right speed. Even Hagen, the only active character on screen, squints continually through the attachments that hide his full face and talks his crazy talk in a really quiet, clearly obsessive, voice. The set design here is magnificent and the choices on the technical side are no less, everything tilting us just away from the familiar.

You'll notice that I haven't said anything about the story yet and that's for a very good reason. We really don't have much idea what the story is until at least two thirds of the way into the movie. For now, Teo is content with drenching us in weirdness until the freaky tone that pervades the film is firmly established, enough that we occasionally wonder if it's about to escape it into reality. It's by far the greatest success of the film, because it's notably woven out of each of the elements that might contribute: the sound and the score (which here are often indistinguishable); the camerawork, framing and colour palette; the sets and the props that fill them; the way that everything normal in the script is translated instead into fetish or deviant equivalents; and the effects work, which feels entirely practical and analogue, right down to body painting as minimalist costuming. Everything is designed very carefully so that we recognise each detail that then grows into something else, something outlandish and surreal. We can bathe in it.

As to the story, it's almost impossible to detail any of it without venturing into spoiler territory, because it revolves around four different people, possibly five, who are connected in ways that we don't initially see, but whose connections are eventually revealed. For the most part, the story unfolds backwards, so that if I tell you the basics, which is doable in as few as a couple of lines, it will bypass that process of discovery and affect how you're supposed to experience it. Let me introduce the characters as you'll meet them, so you can attempt to figure it out anyway. Hagen is one, of course, as is the corpse which he's preserving in such a creepily loving manner. We have no idea what he does, but he might be the janitor for a barber's shop. We have no idea what she does either, but she's the Elizabeth we were told about in the first scene with the grey painted gas masked throat singer dude. The other two key players are Morbius and Travis, with the fifth being Travis's little brother, Thomas, who may or may not be even more important still.

We meet Travis early in the film, so there's no spoiler there. He comes to see Hagen, who he shaves with a straight razor forcefully. He's been watching him and what he does with the corpse, so has a proposition for him, one that could bring Elizabeth back to him. He has maps to the borders of the other side; he can find the doors, but he needs a key to get through them and that's where Hagen comes in. As Travis, Chad Grimes is tasked with grounding the acting side of the film. We may have met Hagen first, but he's more of a pawn than a first rank piece; while Hagen is best when he's under someone else's thumb, the actor playing him, Santiago Craig, is best when he isn't, because he can believably veer away from reality into his own freaky mindset. Travis is a more interesting character, because he's dominant over some but the plaything of others. Grimes does well in both aspects, carving people up for a living, caring for his little brother or being talked into things within hallucinations while high on ketamine.

I won't say what part Morbius has to play, but Layton Matthews puts on a magnetic show in this film, both in costume and out of it. If Grimes often resembles Chuck Norris, partly through his facial hair and partly through his demeanour, Matthews more obviously channels Alexander Skarsgård, if you can imagine him as an angel. All the actors deliver here, except Zelieann Rivera, who looks and moves great, but whose delivery is terrible. Fortunately she has the smallest part to play of the key characters, so it's not hard to look past that. Zach Cumer has the toughest role to play as Thomas, a mentally retarded young man who is confined to a wheelchair and contemplates suicide with the assistance of The Mr Skinny Show, which I assume isn't on the weird television that can't tune in visuals but is conjured up instead out of his broken brain. Whichever, the half giant pig, half sumo wrestler who's wrapped in barbed wire and plays carnival music is a genius creation, a notch up the freaky scale from the rest of the freakiness in this movie.

I'm tempted to say that the story is a downside, not because it's bad but because it's given a much lower level of importance than the feel. I adored the feel, but wanted the story to have a little more substance and a little less obscurity. The picture could still function as a dark hallucinatory experience even with an underlying story that makes complete sense or reveals more of itself earlier in the running time. I did like the way that some of the freakiest settings weren't really explained, such as Travis's day job. I've no idea how he'd detail his job description, but it's edgy enough to fit the story and the aesthetic both. When he brings in a babysitter to keep Thomas from finding a way to commit suicide while he's working, he finds another freak who just wants to read his Abasiophilia magazine. Given that abasiophilia is a fascination, often a sexual one, for people with physical disablities, and that the issue of the magazine the babysitter brings is the wheelchair fetish issue, he's hardly a great choice. I like that this is left in the background.

What I would say is a downside is the lack of follow through. Writer Stephanie Joyce fleshes out a story by Teo with panache, presumably responsible for the majority of the agreeable deviancy that populates this picture. However, while Teo conjures up an aesthetic to match that deviancy, with the able assistance of Timothy Andrew Edwards (music), Darin Meyer (cinematography), Damian Drago (editing), Clifton Dance (production design) and Catherine Joyce (art direction), among others, he doesn't seem willing to follow through and show it. For a picture so relentlessly outré, we see a lot less of it than we might think, much of it conjured up through suggestion and clever filmmaking rather than through actually putting it on the screen. The abasiophilia is kept just a freaky background detail just as Hagen's necrophilia is restricted to dialogue, The gorgeous cenobite-inspired monster does little and the gore effects aren't used remotely as often as our minds might remember.

And I wonder why. If Joyce and Teo wanted to be this edgy, why would they stay this polite about it? That to me is the biggest mistake of the film. If they'd have shown everything that they raise, this ought to be a notable cult hit, potentially a thing of legend in underground cinema. Certainly I've never seen a movie with such a consistently out there aesthetic. Hellraiser gets there at points, such as the design of the box and the cenobites (and the soundtrack by Coil that Barker wanted but wasn't used), but it isn't remotely as consistent with its look and feel. It talks about a journey to Hell, while Necromentia firmly suggests we were there all along. In the end, one of its strongest points turns out to also be one of its weakest, that it remains a true horror movie, unwilling to pander to any potential audience and telling precisely the story it wants to tell. This is the one film I wish had lost its restraint and pulled out all the stops. With restraint, it's a powerful immersion into nightmare; without it, it could have been a milestone.

You Touched Me (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Holly Dell, Jessica Bryce, Seth Gandrud and Donald H Steward

Even though You Touched Me screened in the very first set at the 52 Films in 52 Weeks festival, closing up the opening night selection, it stayed with me in much more detail than most of what followed, and I was keen to find out why. I wanted to know what D H Lawrence was saying in his short story and what Travis Mills excised to make it fit into a short film. I especially wanted to discover what the character of Hadrian meant, as Seth Gandrud had little to do in the film but somehow owned it regardless. What I found was that this is one of the more interesting adaptations of the whole series. While Mills retained Lawrence's title and the scene that warrants it, along with character names and a little of the dialogue, he rewrote almost everything else entirely. He didn't do so merely because of time and place, as Lawrence's English story, framed as always in the classes, wouldn't be easy to translate directly to modern day Arizona. He changed every dynamic of the story too and replaced the mildly creepy tone with a more uplifting one.

Not one of Lawrence's characters is remotely likeable. He introduces us first to the Pottery House, an ugly affair which used to be a commercial property but is now residential, then to Matilda and Emmie Rockley, two old maids whose attributes remind of their house. Emmie's coming up to thirty, while Matilda has just passed it, but their attitudes are of much older women, dismissive spinsters waiting for their father to die and leave them everything. Into their life comes Hadrian, as he had done once before. With four girls and no boys, Mr Rockley chose to adopt one from a charity institution, bringing him up as his own. Each of the girls insisted he call them 'cousin', as if it would serve to distance them from his lower class background. They're all framed in class. Emmie and Matilda are unmarried because they feel they deserve better than the town has to offer, while Hadrian moved to Canada so as to be able to escape his class limitations and move up the chain. Mr Rockley sits above it all and plays with the lives of his children.

This depressing tale saw first publication in 1920, soon after Lawrence had begun his voluntary exile from England, what he called his 'savage pilgrimage'. He saw his own country through bitter eyes, as it meant to him poverty, harrassment and accusations. He'd already been investigated on allegations of obscenity, charges that would consistently plague him throughout his career. It's no stretch to read this story as the opposite of a love letter to his country. Thankfully Mills jettisons most of it, replacing creepy manipulation with a more conventional love triangle. He kills off the father immediately, highlighting at the very outset that he's been dead for a couple of days. He keeps Mattie and Emily the same age physically but renders them younger mentally, less isolated and more endearing. Hadrian shows up because of correspondence with his father, so his arrival is a surprise to the girls. Each of the relationships between them are framed in much more positive ways than the bitterness and machinations of Lawrence's characters.

Mills does keep enough substance to avoid this becoming a cheesy romance and wisely frames his story around Mattie rather than Hadrian. Her dialogue is very telling. When the family lawyer tells the girls that Hadrian is here, her immediate response is, 'He isn't blood'; yet when Emily mentions his powerful arms, her first thought is, 'But he's your brother.' Holly Dell is a strong lead, effectively playing two characters who are fighting for control. She's mostly brusque to the point of rudeness, instinctively pushing people away from her, but inside aches to love and be loved; she struggles to let that side of her out. She isn't the old maid of Lawrence's story but, unless she changes, she'll get there. On the other hand, Emily is a soft and giving free spirit, played effortlessly by Jessica Bryce. When the girls are told that Hadrian is in the stable, Emily rushes there to be framed superbly in the doorway, blurry and in soft light because the camera's focus is on him. It's an odd choice but an appropriate one, because it speaks to her emotions.

The two girls are alike in many ways, not least their attraction to Hadrian, but they're polar opposites in others. Emily's heart is on her sleeve, but Mattie's is hidden away deep inside. In many ways, this is why this story works, but it's assisted in no small way by Seth Gandrud as Hadrian. He's a strong man; he left years ago, did whatever, hitch-hiked back from Maine. We get the impression that he could do anything he wants to do, but here he does nothing, just stands there like the cover of a romance novel, while the girls fall apart in front of him, waiting for them to find themselves. He spends his most important scene asleep; it's a parallel to the one in Lawrence's story but switched up entirely to render the title obsolete. Most of his dialogue is, 'I don't mind', his 'As you wish.' Westley in The Princess Bride, was also an active man choosing to be passive for his own reasons. Gandrud is almost messianic in his inherent peace and ability to be in two places at once, but I couldn't find a religious subtext and I looked. This isn't Joyce.

The connections between the original story and Mills's adaptation to contemporary Arizona are one of the more interesting aspects of most of the 52 Films in 52 Weeks. He often had to cut out material, especially from the longer stories and to mixed success. Some of the better films, like The Kiss and Araby, retell the originals in a different way, not just removing material but adding new elements too, whether in the style or the script. Here, Mills rewrote the whole thing, creating a completely new story out of a few elements from the original. Had Lawrence's story been more worthy or Mills's less strong, this could have backfired spectacularly. Fortunately, Lawrence's story leaves a notably bad taste in the mouth and Mills's punches notably above its weight. There's little on the surface, just another love triangle, but there's more going on underneath and it's constructed very well indeed, compact but unrushed: the script, the lighting, the choice of focus. Perhaps Bryce's early scenes should have had a few more takes, but that's about it.

Muñecas (2009)

Director: Rosa Márquez
Stars: Arantxa Peña, Javier de la Torre and Polina Kiryanova

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon IV in Tempe in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

Spanish shorts accounted for four of the eleven screened at FearCon in 2011 and they were an agreeably diverse lot. This one played well, but it suffers from being a little obvious, especially if you can speak the language. The title translates to Dolls, and that's what we see as it begins, at least in an old slang sense. Ana is the tall girl hanging by her tied wrists from the roof of a stable; her legs are tied as well. She's in a striking outfit, all red and black and skin. Her bra, her high heeled shoes, her skimpy top that covers her shoulders and her lips are all hooker red, while her short skirt and her hair (at least in this dim light) are black. She's likely to be a lady of the evening, but she could just have been out for a really good time. It doesn't matter which, of course, as she certainly wasn't expecting to be kidnapped. Chained to the floor and cowering in a skimpy white nightgown is Irina, if her gold necklace is anything to go by. She's scared out of her wits so not much help, but she might be even prettier behind all the tears.

I wouldn't offer a prize for figuring out where this goes for a while. When the man who took them arrives, Irina babbles while Ana shouts. She drinks the water he pours down her throat though, which knocks her out for the night. In the morning, she finds a way to free herself and climb out of the stable, impressively never losing her high heels. To her credit, her first thought isn't escape, it's Irina, so she goes in search of her fellow prisoner. What she finds in the main house isn't at all what she expects as she and we discover the other meaning of the title. From that point on, the surprises are over, but it plays out capably with a neatly freaky final scene, courtesy of actors Geli Albaladejo and especially Javier Botet, who isn't willing to let the wheelchair to which he's confined restrict his perversions. Writer Javier Gonzáles and director Rosa Márquez deserve credit for wrapping up the picture when they do, as it could easily have continued on for a lot longer and spoiled the ending. It finishes exactly when it should.

The cast are capable, though hardly spectacular except for that freaky scene. Arantxa Peña does a good job as the lead victim, not quite the damsel in distress she could have been. She tries valiantly but fails to ensure that her acting ends up more prominent than her outfit. Polina Kiryanova doesn't get to speak, at least not in a language that we can understand, but she sells her part superbly nonetheless. Javier de la Torre is fair in the role that ties everyone and everything together; he does achieve that but not much more. True, he's cast because he's a believable monster without ever looking like one, utterly everyday. The camera is jerkier than it needed to be at points, surely aiming to visualise some of Ana's panic but overdoing it. Other than that, the film looks good, with decent locations, a good score and a characterful song to accompany the end credits, Cat Power's Werewolf. This is a good film if not a great one, but it's enough for me to be interested in seeing Burocracia, which Márquez made with Albaladejo a year later.

Because There are Things You Never Forget (2008)

Director: Lucas Figueroa
Stars: Fabio Cannavaro, Amadeo Carboni, Emiliana Olmedo, Giulio Baldari, Victor Menegas, Nicolo Urbinali and Tiziano Scarponi

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon IV in Tempe in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

This Spanish film, made in Italian by an Argentinian, claims to be a horror movie but really isn't. Certainly it's the horror movie with the least horror to ever play the Phoenix Fear Fest. However, it's a gem of a film that impresses from its ambitious first shot which runs a full two minutes without a cut. We follow a prison guard down a corridor to turn off a radio, to the annoyance of the inmates who were listening to a football game, then turn to reverse down a different corridor, as those prisoners are let out of their cells. When we run out of corridor, we keep going through the bars of a window, soaring over the Italian countryside and eventually dropping down to the street in a village to watch a few kids beating the wall of a house with a besom brush. We soon discover that we didn't just travel miles, we also travelled thirty years, as the kids are the prisoners. That shows a heck of a lot of ambition, echoing other ambitious opening shots like the Orson Welles cut of Touch of Evil or Max Ophüls films like La Ronde or The Earrings of Madame de...

We quickly find out what's going on, in a stylish progression backwards that highlights how that opening shot wasn't a one off. A day earlier, these kids are kicking a football against the very same wall, which is annoying to the old lady on the other side, knitting alone in her rocking chair, given that it's rattling her framed photos. It's even worse on this day because they're kicking a makeshift ball that hurts their feet with its weight. They do have a real ball, but we need to back up another day to discover what happened to that. One of the kids saved up a whole year to buy it but made the mistake of letting his friend take a penalty kick, given that he's completely useless and misses the wall entirely. It bounces along the spikes on the old lady's iron fence, drops inside and breaks one of her flower pots. They ask for it back and she obliges, after stabbing it brutally to death with her knitting needles. 'Perché?' the kid shouts at the gods as she retreats grinning inside and the camera launches itself past the title screen, back to the future.

I've seen many short films whose titles don't appear until the very end, just before the closing credits, but I don't recall seeing one whose title appears during the second half of the film. What I've outlined above is the introduction, setting the stage for what the kids do for revenge, beginning the moment that we first met them. I suppose this is the horror angle to the film, if you can call it that, but it really doesn't have a horror tone. This is drama, pure and simple, pitting poor kids doing what they love against the old woman who they've been tormenting. Revenge begets revenge and we know where they're going to end up after it all goes down, but we can certainly enjoy how we get there. The camerawork of Javier Palacios keeps it spectacular, the kids are as engaging as they are arrogant and the music is a glorious thing, a character of its own, mixing mambo energy with the traditional opera to accompany the beautiful game. Best of all, it plays along with the creaking of the old lady's rocking chair and the pounding on her wall.

None of the characters are named, so I have no idea which actors play which parts, except that Emiliana Olmedo is the only woman in the cast so is surely the old lady. Pattern spotting tells me that the first two names are the present day prisoners, while the last four are the kids, but only the internet tells me which prisoner is which. You see, one of them is a rather famous name in Italy, if not my household. He's Fabio Cannavaro, the professional football player who led Italy to victory in the 2006 World Cup, the same year he won as FIFA World Player of the Year. Clearly he was having fun by being in this picture, given a long prison sentence where he's stuck with friends who can't kick a football to save their life. Just how Lucas Figueroa, the writer and director, landed him for this project, I have no idea, but if there's a way to make the film any more memorable, that's surely it. At the end of the day, whether it counts as a horror movie or not, it was a great way to kick off Phoenix Fear Fest IV in 2011.

Because There are Things You Never Forget can be watched for free online at YouTube.

Errors of the Human Body (2012)

Director: Eron Sheean
Stars: Michael Eklund, Karoline Herfurth, Tómas Lemarquis and Rik Mayall

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

This multinational science fiction thriller, shot in Germany by an Australian with a Canadian playing the lead and prominent supporting roles for German, Icelandic, British and Japanese actors, takes a worthy new approach to its genre and gets a lot right. Like all the best science fiction, it tells a quintessentially human story within its scientific framework, this one centered around communication, which here goes a lot further than merely the ability of people to talk to each other. The film's director, Eron Sheean, within a Q&A during the picture's US première at Austin's Fantastic Fest in 2012, explained that it was 'about a breakdown in communication, both on the surface in the characters and internally with the cells.' If our innate ability to communicate is what moves us forward as individuals and as a race, the lead character, Dr Geoff Burton, quickly sets the stage to move in the opposite direction as he's socially broken, unable to talk to his ex-wife, his ex-mistress turned new co-worker and pretty much anyone else.

The good news is that Burton is played by Michael Eklund, who turns in a stunning performance one year before The Call but two after his role in Xavier Gans's The Divide, surely cast here because Sheean wrote and produced that picture though it's this one which promptly became his demo reel. Initially he's a little reminiscent of Aaron Hotchner in Criminal Minds in the way that he's clearly very bright and capable but also very insular, but as the script lets loose on him with brutal irony, he loses that clinical air. As the plot escalates, Eklund's acting escalates with it so that his character falls apart with starkly believable effect. Before we get to that point, of course, we're supposed to see his potential as both that future nightmare waiting to happen and as the new research scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. He was invited here by its head, Samuel Mead, in the form of a very serious Rik Mayall, looking more like a politician here than he ever did as Alan B'stard, MP.

Burton has moved to Dresden for two reasons. One is that he's a very talented scientist, notable for work at the University of Massachusetts on the early detection of embryonic abnormalities. Originally he was a bacterial biochemist, but was drawn to genetics because of his son, who suffered and died at the age of a single week from a rare genetic mutation that now bears his name, Burton's Syndrome. The other is that his work had become entangled in what Mead describes as a 'politicised environment' back in the States, where he couldn't be fired outright but could have his funding progressively restricted until he quit of his own accord. He'll have more freedom here to pursue his work, though he's quick to explain to audiences that his pre-screening of embryos does not mean that he's practising eugenics. This is Germany, after all. Of course, this is a movie so there are plot points waiting for him in Dresden too, less believable but more cinematic in their ability to spin a yarn around Burton and his work.

The one he knows about is Rebekka Fiedler, his former intern and mistress, presumably a strong reason why he's no longer married to his wife, who is now pregnant by her new man. What he doesn't know yet is exactly what Fiedler has been doing in her work to regenerate limbs or what a previous partner, Jarek Novak, has spun that work into in a secret lab in the bowels of the institute. Naturally, he'll find out soon enough, given that the reason Mead reached out to him in the first place is the condition of her research. She's been achieving wonders with axolotls, regenerating limbs at rapid speed, but she's been unable to transfer that success over to mice, which are Novak's specialty. Of course, it's not rocket science to see where this is going to take us, but it unfolds against the backdrop of two key ideas, both outlined during Burton's first lunch at the institute. The first comes from an odd but endearing duck called Chiba, while the second comes from Novak himself, keen to the degree of fanatical.

Chiba reconstructs the skeletons of the fish he eats in the cafeteria, because he likes to see big pictures. Too many of us talk about food but not how it got to us, naturally echoing how many of us talk about the cures that medical science can provide but not the research it takes to perfect them. In other words, the end does not justify the means, even if we shroud the means in mystery and pretend that the end was always the beginning. Novak plays up how he's the same as Burton, because of 'taking risks, whatever it takes, new brave world.' His personal dream is to harness the distribution power of mosquitos to spread vaccines to the populace rather than disease. Rather than eradicating the problem, why not use science to transform it into the solution? It's an enticing concept, but while Chiba feels grounded but interesting, Novak, with his stereotypically sinister bald head and expressive eyes, feels overly eager and freakish. I like the combination of these two ideas, which ground the film neatly.

There are other strong aspects to the film. The pace is slow but measured, somewhat like Burton himself and the work he does. I've read that Errors of the Human Body is unparalleled in the accuracy with which it depicts 'the look and feel of a high level research lab', to quote an IMDb review. Of course, much of this is due to Sheean's access to the real Max Planck Institute as an artist in residency. He developed the film over six years at the institute and was gleefully happy when they agreed to let him shoot it there. This is why the colours are so interesting, very clinical in tone. We might expect gleaming white everything from generations of hospital shows on television, but these shades are more blue and green. Much of the look is the colour of brushed steel with a little bit of light against it. However, that accuracy surely owes some of its success to the pace, which refuses to leap from breakthrough to breakthrough like levels in a game and unfolds with the patience of clinical testing in which every negative result is important as well.

The varied cast help to ground this too. Just because this is a German institute doesn't mean that each of the scientists working there have to be German. Eklund is Canadian, but his odd accent is appropriately a hard one to place, given that Burton presumably moves wherever the work takes him. Karoline Herfurth is German, though she's fluent in the English language and starred in English language productions before this, such as Tom Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and the Kate Winslet movie, The Reader. It's somewhat telling that Herfurth buries Rebekka so deeply in her work that we don't think of her outside it, even though she once again hooks up with Burton in Dresden. By comparison, Tómas Lemarquis screams for attention as Novak, not only because he escalates him up the fanatic scale, but because he's cast so stereotypically. This Icelandic actor without a hair on his head is the very image of science unbound, but he deserves praise for his acting rather than just what he looks like.

The negative side begins with the convenience. Even if I can admire the irony that pervades later scenes and a blistering realisation of the past that comes along with it, I have to acknowledge that it only works because of a stacked set of plot conveniences that are too contrived to buy into. The scientific grounding of the film, which extends so far as a useful PDF download, is seriously stretched by the later scenes that are grounded by their cinematic impact rather than their science. Of course, many will prefer the thrills of the third act to the slower build which aims for coldness, clinicality and distance rather than eye candy. I recently revisited The Astronaut's Wife, a picture which ultimately fails because it achieves the sense of alien detachment that it aims for and so detaches the audience as well. Sheean keeps us more engaged, but he doesn't seem sure who we are. This doesn't work as a horror movie, as horrific as a few moments are, and it doesn't offer the tension of a thriller. Even as sci-fi, it's more sci than fi, then more fi than sci.

In the end, it's really a drama, albeit one that's so drenched in science that it ought to shimmer with dry ice like the experiments in the Planck Institute labs. The technical details gradually reveal themselves to be background, while the themes take over, and most prominent among them is the guilt that's haunted Burton since the death of his son. Perhaps he was a great scientist before that, but we can only presume that it led to his adultery, his divorce, his banishment from American science and the errors he makes in this film both as a scientist and a human being. The title serves double duty, highlighting the mutations that drive his work but also its lead character with all the little obsessions that chip away at his genius. It ends up as a character study, brilliantly portrayed by Michael Eklund. The science that drove the film's creation simply can't keep up with him, which is why it eventually disappoints as a story but never as a performance. Sheean showed promise here, but Eklund's career should skyrocket.

The Four (2012)

Directors: Gordon Chan and Janet Chun
Stars: Deng Chao, Liu Yi Fei, Ronald Cheng, Collin Chou and Anthony Wong

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

The Four, one of many adaptations of a series of novels by Woon Swee Oan, is an infuriating picture that throws so much at us that multiple viewings are required to avoid getting lost. My first time through was confusing for quite a while, the second was clearer while the third was a lot of fun. I'm fond of it now but it really shouldn't take three times through to grasp a plot. Much of the problem boils down to it being a sort of Chinese X-Men which introduces us to so many characters so quickly that it's tough to keep track of them. Some of it is, however, deliberate choice, as if the filmmakers wanted us to have to watch twice to figure it all out. For instance, we see many of the lead characters in the opening sequence, a one shot CGI deal with a camera swooping and soaring like a bird, literally as we're vaguely following a pigeon for surveillance purposes. They appear like featured extras, enough to stand out from the crowd, marked as people we should notice, but only for a moment before they're gone again and the pigeon moves on.

While we see most of the characters during this opening sequence, we have to wait until the first action scene to be introduced to what they do, albeit so quickly that it's tough to keep track. They all head over to the Drunken Moon, a rather delightful inn, to watch Jia San try to sell a fake coin cast that presumably ties to the rampant forgery going on in the town. A debt collector known as Life Snatcher meets him, but when he realises that their wine is poisoned, all hell breaks loose. Life Snatcher battles another martial arts master, while others use wilder talents to stop Jia San escaping with use of body duplication magic. One young lady in a wheelchair hurls things around telekinetically. Her boss uses qigong power to pull people towards him like a tractor beam. We watch this all unfold at lightning speed until they all end up outside, trapped by the constabulary known as Department Six, who descended en masse on the inn and aim to arrest everyone. Only now do we get to the point, that we have a clash of authorities going on.

Department Six are the standard police force around here and they scare most people silly because they exude brutal and militaristic power. They're fond of intimidation tactics and shows of force, which lead to overkill shows like what we've just seen. Their uniforms are dark and fetishistic, as are their headquarters which are vast, echoing and arrogant in their overt worship of power. Their commandant is Lord Liu who runs Department Six through a standard chain of command with four supreme constables. It took me a long while to realise that these characters, who were introduced much earlier than this, are not the Four of the title. Then again, this is an origin story, so we're watching how the Four come together and where they fit in the grand scheme of things. At this point, one them works for Department Six; he's Cold Blood, the master who fought Life Snatcher at the Drunken Moon, but he's about to be publicly fired but secretly tasked by Lord Liu with infiltrating the Divine Constabulary, the secret organisation we've just met.

The Divine Constabulary couldn't be any more different than Department Six if that was the basis of its funding. I loved everything about them except the contradiction that sets them up. Apparently, they're a secret police force, small and select, which reports directly to the emperor through their calm, polite and humble leader, Zhuge Zhengwo, the man with the tractor beam power. Department Six haven't heard of them, so plan to arrest them at the Drunken Moon until the Prince arrives and orders Zhuge to show Lord Liu his imperial badge of office. Yet this secret police force hitherto unnoticed has their own headquarters in town with a sign on the door reading 'Divine Constabulary'. That anomalous sign notwithstanding, it's a glorious place. It's utterly organic, a light and inviting home full of wood and paper, space and curves. Nobody wears uniforms and nobody barks orders. The atmosphere is one of trust and the group of people there feel far more like a family than a police force.

Having saved Life Snatcher from arrest by Department Six, Zhuge invites him to stay, to become one of them. He wants to leave, but is suckered into staying through flattery and wine. Lots of wine. Aunt Poise from the Drunken Moon brings good wine and they drink for free. With Life Snatcher under their roof, the Divine Constabulary now have three of the Four within their organisation, the other two being Iron Hands and Emotionless. Emotionless is the more obvious; she's the telekinetic girl in the wheelchair, who sees into people's thoughts and quantifies the strength of their qigong power. To go where she can't, she also has a bird, a pigeon called Skywings who led us on that merry dance through the sky to show us the key players during the opening credits. Iron Hands is their blacksmith and carpenter, who can forge glorious devices for the group, including a wonderful wheelchair/Segway for Emotionless to power with her mind. Presumably he built the secret doors and awesome steampunk library too. I want.

There are many others, but those are the major players because they're ranked among the Four, even if that doesn't seem to be official nomenclature. They're colourfully named, of course: Big Wolf, Dingdong, Guts and Bell, who in the form of Tina Xiang may just be the cutest creature I've ever seen. And into their ranks comes Cold Blood to shake everything up. He isn't merely a Department Six constable undercover, he's also some sort of moody beast man who was raised by wolves and he quite obviously has the hots for Emotionless. Other key players include Ji Yaohua, the leader of the ladies hired into Department Six at the beginning of the film, on the orders of the Prince, and Lord An Shigeng, the God of Wealth, who she's really working for and who's clearly highlighted as the villain of the piece very soon into the picture. Lord An has the coolest moves yet: the ability to freeze people or burn them alive at a single touch. Stopping a martial arts master from killing you with his sword by catching it in your teeth is a pretty neat trick too.

With this dizzying array of characters finally introduced in about a quarter of the film's two hour running time, we can start to watch their dynamics click into gear like a clockwork plot. Sure, this may all happen against a cool background of imaginative locations, wirework fights and Machiavellian intrigue, but really the plot isn't particularly interesting. We know after twenty minutes that it's all going to come down to a big battle with the big boss, Lord An, and given that this is the first part of a planned trilogy we know the good guys at the Divine Constabulary are going to win. This knowledge lessens the tension and renders some of the subplots meaningless, like the battle between Department Six and the Divine Constabulary. Like the heroes are ever in danger of losing their mandate to the local guys? To be frank, at this point, do we even care about the rampant forgery plaguing the town? Again, we know that's all going to get taken care of one way or another. We're too busy watching the people.

Ronald Cheng is the most engaging of the Four as Life Snatcher. He's a prolific actor who always provides good entertainment and he works well as the will he/won't he outsider who is always going to join in the end. Collin Chou has promise as Iron Hands and absolutely looks the part. He's the least used of the Four, so it's the writing that lets the character down rather than the actor. The moody stylings of Liu Yi Fei and Deng Chao as Emotionless and Cold Blood respectively might endear them to a particular demographic but I found them less interesting because they're a notably emo couple. Above the Four is Anthony Wong as Zhuge Zhengwo. He's by far the most experienced member of the cast, typecast for years as notably outrageous villains, not least in his first Hong Kong Film Award winning role as the serial killer who baked his victims into meat pies in The Untold Story. He steals every scene he's in here by being the opposite of outrageous, making us very aware that he has immense power but keeping it constantly in check.

On the side of the villains, Wu Xiu Bo is delightfully cocky as Lord An, at his best when he's commanding an army of reanimated corpses. Jiang Yi Yan is more vanilla as Ji Yaohua, not particularly memorable until her fight with Emotionless, which is highly entertaining. As an origin story, there's less attention given to the villains though and far more to those little dynamics between the characters that will no doubt work as ongoing subplots throughout the sequels. Lord An is more apparent here than, say, the villains in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, another origin story with an ensemble cast of characters, but he and his minions clearly don't get the attention that the ongoing heroes do. The biggest problem the script has is in its attempt to cram so much in, because we'd appreciate so much of this all the more if we didn't miss it by blinking. It's fine for us to miss little background details, because that sort of thing will draw us back to watch again, but losing introductions and key plot points like explaining the title is unforgiveable.

And, at the end of the day, the speed at which this unfolds is both what is most memorable about the film and its biggest flaw. The fights are cool but they're so frantic that we often can't catch what's going on. It took me two viewings to nail down who some of the minor characters were, why they were in the picture and what purpose they served, all because they're skipped over so quickly. Here's a key scene in the plot, but don't dally on it because here's another one and, if you didn't catch the first one, the next three won't make any sense at all. On one level, this would have worked much better had it been slowed down to fit a four hour mini-series instead of a two hour film. Perhaps I should seek out the TV series on the Hong Kong channel TVB, also titled The Four, which ran for 24 episodes of 45 minutes each. Then again, if we could easily figure out what's going on in a slower version of this film, its other flaws would become much more apparent and those are even more problematic.

Put simply, while this is a Chinese wuxia movie whose trappings couldn't be mistaken as being from any other culture, it's notably reminiscent of western superhero movies. The fact that I much prefer the look and feel of pictures like this to anything I've seen in a Marvel superhero movie doesn't mean that it isn't acutely derivative. In what is becoming a sad trend, this is a Hollywood action movie in Chinese clothes, for all that the source material was penned by a Malaysian Chinese novelist who studied in Taiwan and lives in Hong Kong. It's formulaic stuff which tries to cloak its unoriginality in its blistering pace but fails because the more interested we become in the characters, the more we realise that their powers aren't traditionally Chinese, they're just mutant powers from X-Men and its like translated into vaguely Chinese characteristics. Zhuge is Professor X, the Divine Constabulary is his school for mutants, Emotionless is a Rogue/Phoenix hybrid and so on. If you can get past that, this is fun action fluff. After enough viewings.

Found in Time (2012)

Director: Arthur Vincie
Stars: MacLeod Andrews, Mina Vesper Gokal, Kelly Sullivan and Derek Morgan

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

It took a while for me to remember Found in Time, even though I first saw it less than two years ago. My notes suggested that I liked the concept but not where it ended up, but I had to rewatch to remind myself of why, perhaps because it takes a while to ground itself and until it does that it feels rather confusing. It begins in a field, for instance, where a young man asks an older Peter Fonda hippie type in a colourful shirt to push him back. He isn't a taxi service, he says, but clamps his large hand onto the young man's face until he falls to the grass unconscious, to promptly wake up on a couch looking at a young lady with a laptop. He's Chris and she's Jina, his fiancée. Well, not quite, because he hasn't given her the ring yet, but he will and they're certainly a couple. He's on meds, somewhat unsurprisingly, but she's his rock so he needs her. And he needs to go to work too, with RJ, who serves coffee from the sidewalk with the aid of a manual typewriter and some electronic gadget. They're not your usual street vendors, by any stretch.

They seem to give people precisely what they need, whether that's exactly the right coffee or a key to a box. Yes, this is a little weird. Then again, Chris seems to pay more attention to a nail he nearly treads on in the street, standing on its head and waiting for someone to impale themselves on it, than he does his rock and almost fiancée. Clearly he cares for her, but he's more than a little distracted, literally. When he touched that nail, he seemed to transport to another dimension where he found himself putting it down. It's quite obvious that something is going on here that we aren't being told about yet and Chris and RJ are at the heart of it. In this world, people go up to coffee vendors on the street and ask for stamina, humility or confidence rather than cups of coffee. In this world, people with blood on their shirts and emptiness in their demeanour buy small rocks for arbitrary prices. In this world, people silently present boxes for Chris to unlock with the first key in his tin and refuse to charge a fee for doing so.

And in this world, cops take photos of them that mysteriously appear on their cameras as the people they might be thinking about. Here's where we really understand that we're not in Kansas any more, Dorothy. I don't know if this world is supposed to be an alien planet that looks uncannily like our own or an alternate dimension that's just that far adrift from us. At this point, it seems almost appropriate that RJ is played by Derek Morgan whose first regular role on TV was as a character called Thomas Gibson, three years before the Criminal Minds franchise launched, with its lead actor, Thomas Gibson and most prominent character, Derek Morgan. To us, this really ought to be nothing but a meaningless coincidence, but the framework of this film almost wills us to search for weird patterns. This is disjointed stuff, with clearly deliberate intent, I'll grant you, but disjointed nonetheless. We're stuck at the level of little Billy, for whom Chris fills a little bag with crayons. 'What are you doing?' he asks. 'How do you do it? You're scary.'

Even the explanations don't explain much because everything is either cryptic or surreal, depending on our point of view. That customer who bought a rock? Apparently the cops beat him up because he might have used it, but he comes back for another one, which Chris refuses to sell. The psych cops would take away their licenses and send them to the Mine. The customer doesn't believe it exists, whatever it is, but Chris claims to be able to see it in the faces of the cops. Either writer/director Arthur Vincie was dropping some serious acid as he put this together or it's all going somewhere, merely collating confusion factors. Making the lead character a psychic is one, but having his mind experience the days in a different order to his body is another. Having characters swap places, depending on how Chris dreams those scenarios, is a third. Having what might be everyone in the story apparently be there for one reason but possibly a few more besides is what makes it quintessential Philip K Dick.

Trying to fathom what this film was trying to tell us reminded me of Dick stories like Time Out of Joint, in which the lead character has a strange profession, lives in a world that's almost but not exactly like ours and who starts to experience weird anomalies that he can't initially explain. In stories like that, what we see is just a front because something completely different is going on behind it and we have to discover what that is. Here, we're not sure who to look at. Should we be looking at the cops, who are over the top and drawn from a dystopia that this world doesn't quite seem to be? Should we concentrate on vendors, which here seems to be a given role as much as a profession? How about the psychiatrists, like Jina, who do their work from behind masks that are rather like welding helmets fashioned by Apple? Clearly we're supposed to watch the characters who appear in more than one category, but at least three of these are identified quickly, even if their reasons are not. If anything, we wonder about the ones who aren't.

It's around the fifty minute mark that we appear to be given an explanation though, of course, we can't be remotely sure that this reality is indeed reality or just another front. The film's synopsis suggests that Chris, who experiences time like a jigsaw puzzle, finds out that he commits a murder in the future, so he attempts to change his past and present in order to prevent that from happening. This may be true, but it would seem to be a massive oversimplification. From what I understood of the story, the key to unlocking the confusion is the realisation that not one but two characters, who are connected in a number of ways, are doing exactly the same thing and their respective efforts are undoing each other's. Floating around that are the people who are somehow monitoring this, at least one of which has their own motivations to change this particular future. Then again, what do I know? I'm experiencing this story as a jigsaw puzzle too and, after taking two runs into this particular trip, I'm still only sure that I'm not sure about anything.

With a story this deliberately fractured, multilayered and open to different interpretations, it has to live or die on other factors. It can't simply rely on the story to hook us because after a couple of times through, I still don't know for sure what that story is telling us. I do like the basics that it uses as building blocks, the idea that in this world, wherever it is, there are people with talents and those talents can be used to form and reform that world. I like that the script refuses to answer our questions but is content to pose others in dialogue. 'What do we really know?' asks Ayana, one of those double characters, the vendor who sets up next to Chris and who sees his almost fiancée for psychiatric help. 'We think we have some say in how things happen?' I also like how some characters remain unexplained and thus open to interpretation, like the hippie with the spider tattoo on his neck. Is he God? Is he some nature spirit, given that we never see him outside the forest? Is he a humanoid visualisation of a place? Who knows? We can argue that all day.

If the story defies analysis, at least the performances of cast and crew are quantifiable. MacLeod Andrews is a decent lead, reminding of Jake Gyllenhaal in both looks and screen presence. He has surprisingly few credits to his name, IMDb suggesting that this is his first feature. Derek Morgan is very capable too, even if his character fades somewhat, to be replaced by Mina Vesper Gokal as the new vendor, Ayana. I'm still not sure about her performance here, as it doesn't seem to find a consistent tone. Andrews acts as if the story revolves around his character, while Gokal seems to react to him and others rather than setting her own stage. I've actually seen her before, in a dubious cannibal vs zombie movie initially called Holocaust Holocaust and later renamed to its tagline, Destined to Be Ingested. This is a better film, but not because she had a bigger part. Kelly Sullivan is better as Jina, though she was much better before we start asking too many questions about who she is and thus what she's doing.

Behind the camera, things are capable enough for us to translate what we see in an attempt to figure out the story. The camera moves oddly, making the whole thing feel disjointed, and the editing enhances the trippy feel. Characters can move in a consistent direction, yet suddenly be somewhere else, whether that can be interpreted as physical, astral or metaphorical. The view often waves around, though in more of a buoyant, floating way than a traditional handheld one. The score is strong, the odd combination of cello, harp and percussion making it memorable. On the negative side, the footage of Chris and Jina interacting on a New York street was clearly guerrilla style shooting and there are too many people obviously looking at the camera for us to focus. The scenes in the Mine are crazy low budget and unconvincing. And I'm at a loss to explain the ending, which feels to me like a huge copout. I think I've figured out most of the plot after two trips through Found in Time, but not all and the ending especially makes no sense to me.

I wish my readers luck in getting further than I did. I'd love to hear what other people read into this film and whether it made sense to them. I'd love to know if the ending felt right to anyone, or if they sat there watching the credits roll wondering if they'd blipped out for a while just as Chris does periodically in the story. To be honest, I'm still not quite sure what causes Chris to experience the world in the way he does and, if it isn't inherent, who's causing it. There are so many questions here that every time I think I've got it down, I start to argue with myself about whether I've understood any of it. Found in Time will surely be right up the alley of those who tend to appreciate complexity for its own sake. I enjoy being treated like a grown up by filmmakers and given something substantial to get my teeth into, but I don't enjoy being led down the garden path by something that can't be explained at the end. I'm not yet convinced that Arthur Vincie understands the story he wrote, but I may end up giving it a third attempt to figure out.