Angst (1983)

Angst is an Austrian movie, made in the glorious year of my birth. We follow .... ....., a guy who has been living 14 years of his life in prison - first for attempted murder of his mother, then for a random old woman he killed. He narrates his story to us.

This movie is so essentially Austrian that I only want to mention it once. This movie breathes Austria.




Our protagonist informs us that he plans to kill again - and again and again. His plan consists of visiting the first café that's open to look for a human.




Camera, editing, sound and acting combine to create a tense atmosphere. Our protagonist - our killer - needs to act out his fantasies after 10 years in prison. After a failed attempt to kill a female taxi driver (she reminds him of his first girlfriend...), he gets out of the taxi, slightly disoriented, and runs through the wooden area. He does not know where he is, how long he was running or into which direction. Aimlessly, he walks on.

...until he chances upon an apparently empty, deserted house surrounded by a park with a small wood and a lake. Ideal - no neighbours anywhere, big, isolated... our protagonist breaks a window and enters the house.

He is full of nervous, greedy tension, and informs us that he cannot take it much longer without... without. He is afraid - in a state which ruled out any logic. He is afraid of himself. Thoughts of his grandmother and his early childhood fear of being alone in a dark room. Haunted and tense, he wanders through the house... and then he sees the white car approaching. The inhabitants.




His plan will work. This place is perfect.

What follows is the spiraling down of our protagonist's rational thought into disorder and fear, the events spiraling out of conscious control. His thoughts scatter, drift back to his childhoods. His mother tried to kill him. He explains it to us in the same way he explains to us that he hadn't been wanted by his mother, as she would have preferred a girl. Growing up with his grandmother, who was very religious, he was sent to a monastery. They also kept animals there, and he used to go there and cut one of the animals - a pig - until it bled and screamed. After that, he'd had to leave the monastery. His mother then told him that his family had to be afraid of him. Fear. Abuse had followed, in order to discipline him.




All the while, he is pacing around frantically through the house, searching for his victims. He needs to find them. Needs to kill them. Both of the still living victims are incapacitated in some way... so it's not that difficult to find them. But still, nothing went as he had imagined it. He wanted it to be ...more dramatic.

The plan goes haywire. One of the victims, the old woman, appears to be unconscious, and he needs her to be conscious. He wants to see her suffer. Semi-freeing the daughter, he crawls off with her to the kitchen to find the medication for the old woman. Indiscriminately, he feeds her pills, for she still needs to whimper and cry before him - she cannot die just like that. But she's dead.

Rage.

And then... cold again. Now, only the girl is left.

But this death also doesn't go as planned, and frustration consumes him - his urges are still unfulfilled. No torture. No pain. Everything went too fast, had been too much out of his control.

And then... well, then things spiral even more out of control.




The camera is always well done - nothing special, a bit minimalistic, but good at capturing the mood of an Austrian city and Austrian, uhm, woods. Some of the shots are more than just good and help to add a frantic, surreal atmosphere to the movie, as befits a flick about a serial killer spiraling out of control. There is no logic to his psychotic needs anymore - where before there was cold planning, there now is hectic, frantic, impulsive rage and delusion.

Killer-wise, we get treated to some light necrophilia (if we can call it that) and the spectrum of manic episodes in a disordered serial killer after his first kills in 10 years.

I congratulate Erwin Leder for his portrayal of the psychopath. It's a good performance that shows us one of the myriad faces of mental disease. He really is perfect for the role - whilst watching Angst, you can literally see Leder grow into the role more and more the more demented our protagonist becomes.




He is, as an actor, delving into the midst of psychotic, fragmented thought - the thought-pattern that has come to dominate our killer's psyche. Wide shots accompany him as he hurries to the car, showing us the bleak Austrian landscape of autumn. That specific Austrian feeling. Funny Games (the original, not the remake) had some of that atmosphere as well, but nowhere near as completely and markedly as Kargl's Angst.




Déja vù.

A brilliant movie. I personally can only recommend it.



10/10 unstable serial killers who never experienced their mother's love.

The Living and the Dead (2006)

I really don't know how to classify this movie - but that's not a bad thing at all. Let me try to explain...

Attention: screenshot - intensive.

The Brocklebanks are a weirdly dysfunctional family. Father Donald Brocklebank has, at the verge of bankruptcy, decided to leave the family manor Longleigh House for London, to get treatment of his terminally ill wife Nancy. The main problem, though, isn't Nancy's disease - it's their son, James, a young man who is a little bit... unstable.




I may have to define my use of the term 'unstable' a little bit more: His breakfast consists of medication. A lot of it. I have to take a lot of meds in the morning, but my pharmaceutical breakfast looks ridiculous compared to the amounts that James is taking - even when he's under-medicating himself. Because James needs his medication.





James seems to be on the verge of psychosis most of the time, his erratic behaviour getting more extreme. He seems to be aware of his condition, shooting himself up with medication, which seems to calm him down (I'd like to know what it is that he's injecting himself with).




His father, who has to leave the mansion they're living in (without any people working for them - it's just Donald, his wife and his insane son) and who appears to be strict, harsh even when dealing with James, shows a touching side of a father's love for his son when he finds him early on in the movie, a wound on his head from banging it against various objects, passed out on the kitchen floor. He may be harsh, but he does care for James - his pale, erratic son...






Something will go wrong, we realise, as James decides not to shoot himself his much-needed medicine the morning after his father has left for London.




He tells his mother that he will take care for her whilst her husband is away, and that the nurse which is supposed to do that cannot come. His mother is suspicious... and worried. She is bedridden and cannot care for James... who would need being cared for just as much as she does.




At minute 26, there is a sudden change in the tone of the movie. An urgency is gained that has not been present before, and it will be with us at certain times throughout the rest of The Living and the Dead.

Hectic. The focus shifts from James' mother to himself and his frantic experience of the world around him - dissociative, breaking apart. He reminds me of some of the schizophrenics I have met in associated hospitals, and his distorted perception of time also seems familiar, though in a less insane way. It hits a nerve... or two.




James decides to lock out the nurse (Sarah Ball) when she arrives, and this, for some reason, sends the woman into some nameless, urgent feeling of dread and panic. She leaves, and James is left with his mother - who doesn't want him to stay with her any longer, as she clearly sees the change taking place in her unstable, demented son.




He feeds her pills that she doesn't want to take, obviously scaring her. His aggression becomes more and more intense, and he's forcing her to swallow more pills after he attacks her. She has difficulties breathing and wants to speak to his father, but he becomes even more erratic and aggressive, yelling at her that he "is the man in the house".

Finally, his mother throws up the pills, and he is devastated, screaming and yelling at her while she flees in her wheelchair...




James has degraded into a raving madman as he watches his mother flee, falling out of her wheelchair onto the stairwell.




The second day arrives... and James doesn't take his medication. Again. And now, the movie truly begins... taking us with it on a meandering, surreal path through mind, illusion, reality and time - down the rabbit hole, towards the abyss, where Da'ath lurks, and with it - madness and despair.






This movie tells a story - a long, sad story, one of madness and loss, of pain and dissociation from reality. Its language is mainly the medium of pictures - it is hard to convey in words what each of those pictures alone says, on a multitude of levels. Opulent in its simplicity, I am confident to say that this movie is brilliant in its optical execution of a dreamlike, surreal experience that bespeaks a philosophical depth rarely seen in a conventional horror movie.




The eyes drink in the ever growing intensity of the pictures and scenes, whilst the mind struggles with making sense of it - what is real? What is illusion? What is future, what is past? Is there something like reality? What is madness, and what is not? Or is all madness? Time loses meaning, becomes something we cannot make sense of anymore. The Living And The Dead blends the various scenes and episodes that take place in a seamless way which creates the illusion of coherence where none exists - for there is no coherence left within the depths of psychosis.




This brings me to the second strong point of this movie: the acting. As we are following only three characters throughout the whole movie, we can see them in a variety of scenes which help to define their personalities. We know next to nothing about them - but yet we see into their souls, into their fears, despair and inner struggles - and their insanities. And all three main protagonists are doing a really great job.




Which impressed me most was the performance of Leo Bill, who played James Brocklebank (thank you, imdb.com, for the information on the family's last name). His portrayal of the character was most convincing, and he brought an unexpected depth to the staple idea of "the lunatic". It's because of him and through him that we experience the mixing of reality with illusion, of hallucination with reality, of hallucination with hallucination, of reality with reality. Kudos to him. His portrayal of body-wrecking physical and mental agony that comes in advanced stages of certain forms of psychotic attacks was stunning, and I applaud him for it.




There was a merciless realism to his portrayal of psychotic, dissociative behaviour. It touched me, because this is something very personal for me. It hits too close to home to be entirely comfortable.




Also impressive was Roger Lloyd-Pack, who played James' father, Mr. Donald Brocklebank. He certainly is a good actor, and although his performance was outshone by that of Leo Bill, he still brought life and depth to his character. Personally, though, I find that Kate Fahy ranks in on second place when it comes to the portrayal of the depth of a character. She plays James' mother with a natural ease that betrays her experience as a mother (this by no means implies that her kids are in any way like the fictional character of James Brocklebank). She's a really good actress for this sort of characterisation, as her portrayal of different emotional states was very convincing.




The stories we are being shown in The Living and the Dead are brilliant - because they are real, each single one of them. No matter what version of reality you want to see or will see if you don't embrace all of them as equally real - you will be touched.




It is a dreary movie - there is no joy in it, for even those precious few moments are overshadowed by the gloomy atmosphere of Longleigh House.




Much of the dark, but achingly beautiful mood of the movie is carried by the setting of the old, decaying manor. Set entirely within those brooding walls, the merciless maze of versions of reality gains an extra depth, one that perfectly represents the isolation which is such an integral part of The Living and the Dead.




Isolation - it rings through the movie as a central theme, made out of hollow echoes of bleak despair. Longleigh House is isolated, far outside in the countryside, far away from help. Donald Brocklebank is isolated - all wealth is lost, his wife terminally ill, and his son is lost to him. Nancy is isolated - her health is falling apart, and so is her family and her dreams. And James... James can't even reach outside himself, confined within the fractal madness of his own broken mind, fractalised, dissociative, fraying out at the borders. Reality - lost; to him as well as to us.




The camerawork is outstanding as well. Simon Rumley (who wrote, directed and produced The Living and the Dead) truly shines with this movie - it is executed nearly flawlessly on all levels. The use of light and shadow are brilliant, the camera's angles unusual but highly effective, the frantic editing of some scenes are blending seamlessly into the movie as a whole whilst still delivering the intensity and hectic, dissociative sense of urge that is so characteristic of James' perceptions, the pictures are beautiful... Flawless.




Weaving a net of sounds and impressions is the language. The dialogues never seem artificial or forced - there is, again, a stylistic minimalism at work here, which adds a particular feel of loneliness and - again - isolation to this piece of art. And the soundtrack by Richard Chester is of particular intensity as well. It is hard to describe, but the music has the effect of a painter's few final, highlighting strokes with the brush against the painting as a whole. It is admirable.

I don't know what to say.





11/10

From Beyond (1986)

The Resonator, a powerful machine that can control the sixth sense, has killed its creator and sent his associate into an insane asylum. But when a beautiful psychiatrist becomes determined to continue the experiment, she unwittingly opens the door to a hostile parallel universe... and to the deviant behaviour within the human psyche. With its victims becoming creatures who feed on - and become aroused by - human brains, the Resonator is the ultimate man-made monster. And now something's gone horribly wrong and no one can turn it off!

...or at least that's what my Unrated Director's Cut DVD of From Beyond says. I have to disagree a little bit on the details, but more on that in due course.

First of all, chant with me: Jeffrey Combs! Jeffrey Combs! Jeffrey Combs! Jeffrey Combs! ...etc. etc. pp. ad nauseam. Also... produced by Stuart Gordon, directed by Brian Yuzna... I trust this movie. Call me naive, but I inherently tend to trust anything the two guys come up with. Especially if it features Jeffrey Combs. Or Ezra Godden.

Now, the premise of the movie pretty much is summed up in what my DVD cover said resp. says. The film starts out with Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) activating the Resonator built by Prof. Edward Pretorious (who resides in the building of the Pretorious Foundation, Benevolent St. 666)... and, together with pink light, a nasty, fishy thing appears and bites him into the face before he turns the machine off again, thereby causing the thingy to disappear again.

Meet the Resonator:

A machine designed to awaken the pineal gland to its full potential, thereby awakening a sixth sense - a third eye of sorts, with which one can see into the regions beyond that what is visible to our mere human, mortal sight. Intriguing concept. I vaguely remember that the Principia Discordia recommends contacting Eris through the pineal gland. I doubt that Omar Ravenhurst and Lord Malacalypse the Younger had From Beyond in mind when they wrote those world-changing words, though.
Back to the movie: Of course the experiment worked, and the Resonator opened up a gate of sorts (I am refraining from starting to chant 'Yog Sothoth' over and over now...). Or rather, tore down the barriers between our so-called "real" world and... the beyond.

As a result, IT comes through and devours Prof. Edward Pretorious ("It ...ate him... bit off his head... like a gingerbread man!!"), conveniently by twisting off his head (we get treated to a really nice shot of that later on in the movie).

Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton), quite a pretty psychiatrist (I like her better in her business-like clothes, but I just throw that in now - later, this is open for discussion and a peer review), takes an interest in Tillinghast's case (who, in the meantime, has landed in Miskatonic Mental Hospital... I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't Arkham Asylum, but then again, I can't have everything I want), as no one knows why Pretorious' body is missing a head and... well, because. I am not entirely sure myself.

Intrigued in Tillinghast's story of what happened at Benevolent St. 666, she orders a CAT scan of his brain. To her surprise (and the chagrin of Dr. Bloch, his treating psychologist), the scan reveals that his pineal gland is of abnormal size (bigger than usual, you morons, not smaller) and actually expanding into his brain, extending to the optic thalami. In simple-speak: It appears to be growing.

We all know what this means: Dr. McMichaels thinks that the experiment actually worked and wants to recreate the experiment. Of course, she needs Tillinghast for this, as he is the only one who knows how to operate the Resonator, now that Prof. Pretorious ...died. The police allows her to do so, as they are more interested in solving the case of the dead man with the twisted-off head than in, you know, preserving mankind and protecting it from evil forces from beyond (hah! See what I did there?!). The usual stuff.

Tillinghast, of course, isn't exactly thrilled, but given the choice of spending the rest of his life in the asylum or doing the experiment one more time, he decides to do the lesser of two evils. Or so he thinks...


Arriving at the Pretorious Foundation, I want to add that I really like the scene in which Combs slowly and carefully, full of hesitation, enters the building, with the number 666 (*starts to sing* ...the number of the Beast... *cough* Sorry, won't happen again. Promised.) slowly appearing. He is literally entering his own hell. Maybe I'm interpreting too much into it, but I liked it.

On their tour through the old mansion, they also find Pretorious' pleasure room.

Me like.

So... of course, they get the Resonator running, and stuff happens. Like... critters appearing. For example: A small critter (he just bit Ken Foree!).


We also get to meet Dr. Pretorious again (with a dialogue that is deeply engrained into my psyche due to a track on one of the This Is Horrorpunk compilations... Gods be damned if I can remember which one it is...). He has changed a little bit, but hey, looks are just that: Looks. Judging someone by his tentacles and deformations is just shallow.


Also, remember: Some people change more than others. And more often than others at that.



Of course, Tillinghast and Bubba (Ken Foree, the awesome and hungry police guy) aren't really for continuing with all that stuff - they proved that Tillinghast isn't a schizophrenic crazy, and thus, there is no need to continue with the experiments. However...dear Katherine is already hooked. She wants to continue and do more experiments.

At this point, I need to point out a, you guessed it, plothole: Tillinghast knows that moving whilst the Resonator is on makes the creatures see you when you're in the vibrating field. He tells the others to hold perfectly still. Of course they don't... but he doesn't either. A little bit stupid, if you ask me. Whilst it may not be a definite plothole, it's definitely something to wonder about.

Back to the plot. Our pretty psychiatrist wants to experiment further - because she wants to cure schizophrenia, as it seems to her that an enlarged pineal gland might have something to do with schizophrenia.

Anyone else seeing some sexual tension here, or is it just me?

We also get treated to the heartbreaking story of her dad, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was turned into a vegetable, so she soooooo wants to try the Resonator again. Not because she's hooked on it and turned on by whatever her pineal gland under the influence of the Radiator's vibrations is telling her.

Of course, everything goes horribly wrong.


It's not actually tentacle rape or anything of that sort, but damn, it's still awesome. Sleeping gown-clad young pretty psychiatrists who get touched in a naughty way by semi-melted, metra-dimensional passed on insane scientists. Cool.

And then she's getting hooked on the Resonator's effects even more... which, now, shows us one of its other cool effects: Causing sexual depravity. As according to Magnus Hirschfeld and most of "normal" mankind (be glad I haven't read my new Foucault book yet, otherwise I'd probably start a philosophical rant on that topic...).

I can't really decide whether she wants to be tied to that, or tie someone up.

Sexual depravity, in this movie, comes in the form of looking at beams intended to spreadeagle someone and... dressing up.



...in an outfit I can't decide whether to classify as slutty in the submissive way or slutty in the dominant way. After all, she's wearing a collar.


Also, please agree with me that she looks better when in her business outfit and her hair up. This way, she just looks slightly chubby.

Then again, the Resonator - or rather, her enlarged pineal gland - made her into a sexual deviant, so she goes for the next pretty male she can find. In this case, it's Crawford Tillinghast.


In case you were wondering - he is bald and has minor burns because he nearly got swallowed by a creature from beyond. Obviously, that and his nearly comatose state make him an ideal target for her newly acquired somatophilia.


At which point I want to mention that somatophilia is classically defined (again I refer to Magnus Hirschfeld) as a less sadistic and less "sick" fetish than necrophilia, to which it is closely related (if we consider necrophilia in the classical sense, not in the way that Erich Fromm defined it) - and although I approve of necrophilia, I do not approve of somatophilia practiced on males.

A sombre moment of silence here. Nice gore, though. I knew I could trust this movie!

Humans are such easy prey...

I won't give away how this movie continues. That would rob those of you who haven't seen it of an intense joy that brought me happyful (there it is again, the word I am trying to bring into the mainstream - thanks, Palmolive corporation!). Let me just say that this movie is truly awesome. It's a rare thing for me to stand an 80s movie without getting bored for one single second (obviously, Hellraiser is an exception, as is Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and a handful of others), and this is just a really, really good movie. I like the camerawork, I adore the soundtrack (I give it an A++) - it's not as brilliant as the Re-Animator soundtrack (my all-time favourite), but still amazing. The FX are solid, there's a lot of gooey and slimy goodness, as well as cool and at times funny gore... what else could I want from a movie? Plus, the plot is not too far off the story by HP Lovecraft on which it was based (please compare to Beyond the Wall of Sleep if you have any doubts).

Plus...

10/10 Miskatonic U shirts worn by a protagonist in a Stuart Gordon movie!