“Do know what’s really scary? You want to forget something. Totally wipe it off your mind. But you never can. It can’t go away, you see. And… and it follows you around like a ghost.”
With the exception of the inexplicable detour where he did an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie in America, director Kim Jee-Woon has an impeccable track record. If you’re ever looking for an insane, enjoyable way to spend an evening, you should watch his frenetic take on the Western, The Good, the Bad, the Weird (bonus, Song Kang-ho is in it).
With A Tale of Two Sisters, Kim’s weird sensibilities and inventive visual style are put to great use in the K-Horror genre. It’s strange, disorienting, and enjoyably creepy throughout. It’s weird and disturbing, but actually pretty tame by K-Horror standards.
There were plenty of things I wasn’t into. For one, the Japanese and Korean horror trope of eerily contorted ghost girls with long black hair covering their faces is certainly subject to diminishing returns. Kim does it really well, but it’s still a bit tired at this point, and would have already been a bit tired all the way back in 2003 when this movie came out. Also, when a filmmaker is working really hard to keep the audience off-balance and unaware of what’s happening, there is always a fine line between tricking the audience and lying to the audience, or merely pulling twists out of thin air, which is something A Tale of Two Sisters doesn’t always get right. Also, some of the reveals were a bit cliche in the milieu of the late 90’s and early 00’s.
Still, even with the weaknesses this was still a great way to get your ghost film or K-Horror fix.
“Difficult for a man to know where he stands these days.”
It doesn’t really get more genre-defying than Kill List. Part hitman film, part family drama, part… well, you should see it for yourself, because I don’t want to give anything else away.
Kill List is great. It’s so ambitious and unexpected, so even when it fails, which it certainly does at times, it’s easy to forgive because it’s just trying something so different and weird and interesting.
Ben Wheatley also has a really competent and interesting visual style, so even when story elements aren’t working, it’s still a hell of a lot of fun to look at.
I can’t really say more than that without spoiling this story and world.
Will I Ever Watch It Again? Yes. It’ll be fun to go back to see what I might notice with repeat viewings.
Goodbye vampires, hello to the rest of HMF. It’s been fun bloodsuckers, but it’s time to move on to all the other tricks and treats Halloween has to offer.
First, one of my very favorite HMF films of all time: Pontypool. I wasn’t sure I would watch it this year, but Emily had never seen it and was finally willing to give it a go, and there was no chance I was going to let that opportunity pass by.
I’m not entirely sure what else to say about this one that I haven’t said the other times it was included in previous Halloween Movie Fests. Like here, and here.
With genre and sub-genre, it’s so exciting to see someone do a good job of taking old tropes and conventions and shift them in unexpected ways. Pontypool is the epitome of that for me. In every respect, this film works better than you’d expect it to if I just laid out the concept for you.
If I made a HMF canon, this would be an automatic entry. Also, that’s a great idea. I need to canonize my favorite HMF films of all time.
Will I Ever Watch It Again? Again, and again, and again.
“Time is an abyss, profound as a thousand nights. Centuries come and go. To be unable to grow old is terrible. Death is not the worst… Can you imagine enduring centuries, experiencing each day the same futilities?”
All these years as a film lover, and this is the first Werner Herzog film I’ve ever seen.
Herzog believes, along with many others, that the greatest film to come out of Germany was Nosferatu, which is basically an expressionist rendering of Dracula, but with the names and a few story elements changed in an attempt to avoid issues getting the rights from Bram Stoker’s widow. It didn’t work, because it was obviously Dracula, and they attempted to destroy all copies of Nosferatu at one point. Fortunately, they failed, and once the story came to be public domain, the surviving copies were released on a larger scale. Anyway, Herzog’s love for the film is why he decided to pay homage with an update.
The thing that grabbed me right away about Herzog’s directing is that the man certainly knows how to find places to shoot, then shoots the hell out of them. From the opening credits over the real life mummified remains at El Museo de las Momias to the haunting natural landscapes traversed by Jonathan Harker on his way to visit Dracula, every shot added to the haunting scope of the film. This is a beautiful movie. The places were big and timeless, the city life eerie and lonely, filmed to capture the essence of how small we are in the face of eternity, which is obviously perfect for a vampire film.
Even during a fantastical story of immortal monsters, Herzog’s naturalistic way of shooting characters and dialogue makes it easy to see that this is a filmmaker who is also a celebrated documentarian. At least, it’s naturalistic in early scenes. Eventually the film takes on different visual tone.
There are some slow, awkward moments in the film’s early-going, but they fall away as the film’s hypnotic pace takes hold.
Fun fact: To avoid dubbing for American audiences, they actually shot this film in two languages at the same time. They would shoot the scenes in German and then in English, so two versions of the film exist. I watched the first third in English and then switched to German with subtitles, which I enjoyed much more.
My biggest takeaway from this one is that Klaus Kinski is my absolute favorite Dracula of all time. Such a sad and lonely monster, but a monster all the same. “I no longer attach any importance to sunshine or the glittering fountains that youth is so fond of. I love the darkness and the shadows.”
Just a supercut of all Kinski’s scenes would be worth the price of admission, but Nosferatu the Vampyre has much more to offer than that. This is a beautiful, haunting, mesmerizing film.
Will I Ever Watch It Again? Yes, this one deserves revisiting.
“You were in love with her?”
“It’s not the right word for it.”
This one is disturbing, even by HMF standards.
It’s a slow burn. A very quiet film with long spans shot with no dialogue, and characters who aren’t particularly verbose even when they do speak.
The muted quality makes the scenes of violence that much more jarring. The bloody scenes are themselves still somewhat muted, the camera forces us to watch when we’d rather get a cut or a new angle, anything to give us some distance from the ordinariness of the horror.
Even the film’s quietest scenes are full of menace and danger. The is a movie colored with tones of insanity, desire, isolation, compulsion, power, and violence.
Rape is usually a subtext in vampire stories. However a given mythology works in a particular vampire world, there is almost always the inclusion of the forcible and violent penetration of another against their will. Clare Denis captured that violence to horrifying effect in this film.
These are stories about killing someone for their blood. It’s not that Trouble Every Day is the only film where this inherent violence is dealt with head on, but it definitely got under my skin more than most others.
When the film came out it received a fair amount of hate. But while Trouble Every Day isn’t perfect, the reaction against it was undeserved. As with a film like Peeping Tom, the negative response might just underscore how intentionally troubling the film is. As years have passed, the film has found its audience and appreciators, making the recent Fandor list of 20 greatest films directed by women, based on responses from 50 critics and cinephiles.
Will I Ever Watch It Again? Give me some time to think about that.I’m not sure I can go back into this world again.
“Things only seem to be magic. There is no real magic. There’s no real magic ever.”
Another day, another vampire movie.
Even with all of the success that George Romero had with his Living Dead movies, if you ask him, his favorite of all his films is 1977’s Martin, the story of a man who is definitely a sexually motivated serial killer, and may or may not be a vampire. He certainly believes he is an 84 year old undead monster, as does his hyper-religious and superstitious uncle.
Martin is another politically tinged B horror movie from Romero, with the director using this outing to engage themes of sex, sexual violence, mental illness, suburban ennui, and religion. This is a vampire movie for a skeptical, disillusioned generation.
A small and quiet villain, relying on injecting his victims with sedatives to gain the upper hand, Martin is a disturbing character without ever being imposing. He is lonely, maladjusted, and strange. Whether he is right about being a vampire or not, he is certainly mentally ill. He is also the whiniest vampire I can remember, a bit like the Luke Skywalker of the undead set.
As always, Romero gets a lot out of very little when it comes to budget and resources. Like all of his major works, Martin could come out today and still be relevant and interesting.
Also of note is that this is the first time Romero worked with gore legend Tom Savini, a relationship that would pay immediate dividends the following year with Dawn of the Dead.
Will I Ever Watch It Again? Probably. Especially if I decide to do a larger vampire movie fest for a whole month, which seems increasingly likely to me.
“You’re sad. You don’t remember what you want. You don’t remember wanting. It passed long ago. And nothing ever changes.”
Before getting started, I already summed my thoughts on this one up pretty well last year, without spoilers, which you can read: here.
After this year’s viewing, I still absolutely love this film.
A few specific things I love… spoilers follow.
I love the performances. It’s no small thing to get to know the characters so well with such sparse dialogue, but these actors make it work. Sheila Vand and Arash Marandi are especially great. I’m sad I haven’t seen him in anything else.
I love the way writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour subverts roles in the movie, not just culturally and traditionally, but within the confines of the story itself.
The pimp is set up in every way as the predator, covered in tigers on his clothing, his jewelry, his tattoo. There’s an aggression in the SEX tattooed on his throat. He even has a tattoo of PAC-MAN about to eat a ghost (itself an example of the role of predator switching back and forth). He has animals of prey mounted on his walls. Multiple characters are victimized by him in short order. He takes whatever he wants. Yet he was the prey all along.
This is the most obvious example. It represents the Girl’s predilection for preying on men who prey on women, and the shift of power.
Less obvious role switching and subversion of expectations includes the fact that Arash is dressed as a cartoonish Dracula, coming across the Girl in the night while high on ecstasy to tell her he is Dracula, all the while she is an actual vampire. Yet, while being a vampire, it is the Girl who lets Arash pierce her with the earrings he stole.
The one dressed for the part isn’t what he looks like, the one you expect to bleed isn’t the one who bleeds, the one who normally has the power is actually helpless.
They are small things that can stand out in a movie that is this quiet and deliberate, where gestures and facial expressions do so much of the storytelling. Where everything is so intentional and reveals the characters to us so impressively.
I love this scene:
She is immortal, we don’t know for sure how old she is, but we can sense the emptiness and loneliness. She’s not sure why, but somehow Arash gets into her head. She dreams of him at night, walking to her out of the light, down into the darkness where she lives forever.
There’s that moment, when she’s alone in the frame, that big space of emptiness behind her. We know Arash is going to enter, but it takes several beats longer than it normally would in another film. When it seems like he is going to enter, he still doesn’t. It makes us feel the anticipation, the waiting, the loneliness. And then he does enter the frame, and they slowly come together.
He exposes his throat to her, having no idea how vulnerable he is in that moment, how dangerous she is. Yet, that’s how vulnerability works. We’re always giving the other the potential to destroy us.
And I love that scene at the end. Arash knows what the Girl has done. We’re not sure if he can go through with it, still run away with her. He gets back in the car, the cat sitting between them. The cat would be hilarious and adorable regardless of context. However, here, it represents what she’s done. It represents what he knows she’s done. It sits there between them, but then, they look at each other.
I love this movie.
Will I Ever Watch It Again? Yes. As I wrote last year, I’d watch this on on repeat.
