Rabid (1977)

Good to know. Thank you, movie.

We start out with a woman and a man riding a motorcycle - rather fast - through some nice scenery of wood and fields.

Cut to a medical corporation - a bunch of high-ups are discussing a new kind of plastic surgery.

Cut back to the couple on the motorcycle - and there's a big car trying to turn around their SUV, stuck on the road.

This

+

This


=

This


turning into

This (Yes, there's a person inside)

Luckily, someone sees the accident happen, and the ambulance is called quickly. The guy only has a broken hand and some other minor injuries, but the woman... she burned, and needs to have major surgery. She's rushed to a hospital where the medical corporation guys were discussing earlier - about a new kind of plastic surgery...

As the woman is badly injured, they use the new, radical plastical surgery technique. Taking skin from her upper leg, they created grafts from that skin, going back to something akin to stem-cell-research.

2 Months later... the woman is still not conscious.

One night thought, she wakes up screaming and flailing around. A guy comes to check for her, and she insists he stays as he wants to call the doctor... and complains that she is so cold and he is so warm. She hugs him... and he starts to scream, and blood starts to flow from under his arm. And she... she seems... excited.




Our female protagonist escapes from the hospital one night and chances upon a stable with lifestock in it. She hugs one of the animals, and ...something appears to happen. She seems to receive ...something, but it makes her sick and she throws up. Blood.

The story rolls on from that point - a typical Cronenberg movie. His visual style is arresting, as usual, the changes of focus, the simple, crisp pictures, the lingering shots... everything we know to expect from the Master. Yes, I adore Cronenberg far too much, just like Stuart Gordon and a few other directors.

Basically, Rabid is a movie about blood, changes in blood and changes in people. Physical and mental changes. Rose (our protagonist) is undergoing changes of a definitely weird nature - the skin graft on her arm grew into a penis-like feeding spike. It basically works like a vampiric feeding-device, like fangs or a sort of short tentacle to tear into people and suck their blood.
In turn, people who get... uhm... fed off by Rose turn into bloodthirsty, living vampire-beings. As the incidents spread, the media and police suspect rabies infecting the people involved. They have no idea that what they are facing is people changing into blood-feeding creatures, and that the cause is nothing but a young woman... that has changed in a grotesque, vampiric way (but without all the modern, 21st century vampire-"coolness" attached to it). Rose is a rather plain woman, has no special powers.




The "infected", on the other hand, degenerate more and more the longer they live, especially without nourishment. Some look like zombies.




Rose continues her spree through the US, feeding and infecting people with whatever it is that changed her into what she is now.

The pain of our protagonist is palpable in several scenes, as Need consumes her and she can't/doesn't feed on the human blood she needs.




Soon, the epidemic of infected people is getting out of hand. Martial Law is established, as it has turned out that the victims of the "rabies" are immune to medical intervention. Shooting them is as good as capturing them, because they will fall into a coma shortly after arrest (and being kept from feeding) and die soon. Surely it's more humane to shoot them before they reach this state?




It's amazingly brutal for a Cronenberg movie - compared to his other movies, there are lots of kills, some just for the sake of shedding more artificial blood (which looks remarkably realistic at times, and at times like pink goo). Kudos for that.

Te camera is outstanding, as is the editing. The use of body language and lighting and shadow are also professional - Cronenberg shows what he can do once again.

An atmospheric movie I can only recommend. Earns my stamp of approval.



8/10 ways of suffering because of something one doesn't understand

Aftermath (1994)

A heart beating. A woman screaming. Blood.

Such ends the life of a young woman. A young woman we shall get to know well.

There's no dialogue - not just hardly any dialogue, as in Trouble Every Day, but literally no dialogue whatsoever. No single word is uttered throughout the whole movie. Blessed silence, leaving us to Sound and Sight... and Imagination.




Suffice it to say, this is not a movie for the faint of heart. If you like sick underground flicks like that, prepare for a mercilessly beautiful movie - achingly beautiful in its simplicity and exposé. If you don't like "sick" movies... I suggest you find something else to watch together with your bunch of friends on your birthday party.




Aftermath is a brilliant movie that deserves to be seen by a wider audience. Granted, today's audience is made up of kids who would screetch around... but still. I totally approve of this movie. One of my favourites.







11/10 pieces of cloth used for brain tissue.

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 Brood (1979)

Finally. I've finally managed to watch The Brood - as you might have cunningly guessed, seeing as this is a review of the movie by yours truly (aka me, myself and the beast within*).

Let me preface this by stating that I am a big fan of David Cronenberg. Besides for Stuart Gordon and, more recently, Rob Zombie as well as Alexandre Aja and Eli Roth, he's one of the few directors/writers/producers whom I really like a lot. This also includes going to unimaginable lengths to see his movies - even though, sometimes, it may take me years to find a copy of the movies in question. Such was the case with The Brood... and after I had managed to actually find this movie last year, it of course took me more than six months to actually get around to watching it. And I have no real excuse, besides for "I have more than 1000 (one thousand) movies, I get lost sometimes"...

Just seeing this on my screen makes me happy...

David Cronenberg. A man who is as fascinated by the topic of change and transformation than I am by liminal states of transformation. If you can see the similarities (no worries, they are easy to spot even for dimwitted readers, although I severely doubt that any of my readers fall into that category), you should understand why I love the guy and his work, behind the camera as well as in front of it.




But, enough of me going all fangirl over Cronenberg and on to the movie at hand.

I doubt that many people who read these mental meanderings (and at times, rants) have never heard of the movie, but I'll sum the plot up nonetheless:

Nola Carveth is a woman who, for reasons lying in her childhood, needs to undergo an intense psychotherapy. Having had to deal with an abusive mother and a father who was too weak to defend the girl Nola against her mother, she is all screwed up in the head. Now, that is more or less the situation of a good percentage of the world's adult population... so what makes this psychotherapy different to others?

Say hello to "psychoplasmics".

"Psychoplasmics" is a new brand of psychotherapy, as developed by Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed). The catch is that, during this form of therapy, the patient's body transforms - basically, it works like psychosomatics. Your body transforms in order to fit your mind.

Dr. Hal Raglan, psychotherapist extraordinaire...

A man who has been suffering all his life under an abusive father, abusive stepfather and lack of an understanding father figure develops disfiguring welts, and another man developed lymphatic cancer, apparently due to his intense self-hatred (good thing I'm not doing anything like that... having a weird psychotherapy, I mean...). Now, you'd think that people would be wary of something like that - I certainly wouldn't start therapy if I had to consider that there is a distinct possibility of my body going even more haywire than it already does... but alas, it was the 70s, and things were different back then.

For example, people were allowed to smoke.

Now, the thing that makes Nola different is... well. Her physical changes are a bit more ...drastic than those of other patients of the esteemed Dr. Hal Raglan.




She doesn't just show psychosomatic symptoms or more drastic physical changes, like cancer running wild through her system. No... in her case, she gives birth (if that word can be used) parthenogenetically to the titular Brood - deformed, creepy children which are telepathically linked to her subconscious. And they are attacking those who want to destroy her dreams of a happy life with her child, Candice, and her not-so-loving husband Frank.




The Brood is indeed the shape of Nola's rage... and that rage is directed against those who in any way threaten her and her dreams.

I have to admit that the script (also written by Cronenberg) is not exactly one of the most complicated ones - the movie plays out predictably, and there is no element of surprise to the kills and their order. If you are in any way familiar with horror movies, you'll sit right in front of your screen, nodding to yourself as the Brood kills its way through the people responsible for Nola's problems - and problems she has... verily so**.




There isn't that much to give away in The Brood, but nonetheless, it is a very engaging movie. Not one second did I feel any sort of boredom - which you might not have inferred from my complaint about the predictable script. This is where Cronenberg truly shines - he can take a story, give you hints how it will play out and and he will play all of it out, without any surprising twists, or big and unexpected turns of events or scares. What he does is running along with how the story is supposed to play out, showing us just enough to confirm our suspicions... and yet, it's new, engaging, interesting and at times gritty to watch.




The Brood is spectacularly low on the gory end of things - although we get four kills, all of them the same modus operandi, they are not particularly bloody and violent (then again, that might be my skewed perception of violence - I imagine being bludgeoned to death to be quite a painful and violent experience, but no matter how much I know that, the scenes just didn't register on my violence-radar). However, that doesn't matter at all - and I am a gorehound at heart.




No, what The Brood manages to do is to let us glimpse into the terror of change. Yes, recently, throughout the past years, the subgenre of body horror has risen to new heights, and Cronenberg was particularly absent from the movies that have mercilessly shown us the first-person or third-person perspective of involuntary transformation - but still, he is the undisputed master of venereal horror.




Camera and light are not exactly what I'd call great pieces of art, but they're not bad, either. Above average, yet never so obvious that they'd take away from the story that unfolds before the eyes of the viewer. And I cannot stress enough that this story is a captivating one, although we pretty much know how things are going to turn out. Although I am in no means a filmmaker, and although my contacts with the world of movie-making have only been minimal, I think I can still state confidently in my position as a writer*** that there is an art to making the already known and expected seem more than just interesting - to make that which everyone already expects into a captivating story that unfolds and doesn't lose its psychological grip.




This movie is more than just entertaining - and if you're in any way like me, you'll probably enjoy the movie just as I did.

7.5/10 mothers licking their newborn baby clean...



*A friendly nod goes to the BZFOS here.

**As I already mentioned in another review of mine (can't remember which, though), the word "verily" can be used in a great way to add emphasis to a sentence, as well as killing any sort of idiotic question as to the validity of the statement made in said sentence. But here I just use it for stylistic reasons... and, admittedly, a bit of emphasis. I just needed it.

***Yes. Indeed. I write. Now stop laughing and scroll down!

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