Forest settings have been mined for horror material so often that it’s a cliche. Nearly every mainstream slasher series has a scene with a ‘final girl’ running barefoot through the woods from a monster, with an unrealistically bright moon casting mood lighting over the whole affair. Doing something interesting with this setting is tough after 30-plus years of horrors, but The Interior brings something new to the table with strong characters (in particular the lead), and a script that always turns left when you expect it to turn right.
In the unlikeliest of moves, The Interior’s first half contains nothing whatsoever to indicate that you’re watching a horror film. The first act is a sharply-written comedy in the vein of Office Space, where our sarcastic but indifferent protagonist, James (Patrick McFadden) becomes increasingly frustrated with his thankless desk job, his complete idiot of a boss (Andrew Hayes), and his mundane life in his generic Toronto condo. All of this is brought to a boiling point when James is diagnosed with an unspecified but presumably terminal disease. In a moments notice, James decides to quit his job, cash out, and move to the BC wilderness with almost nothing.
At this point, the horror part of this horror movie actually starts. James arrives in the woods and quickly indicates to the audience that he's in over his head. When an extremely creepy and menacing presence begins to set its sights on James, director Trevor Juras really begins to show his capacity to instill a slowly-creeping dread rather than going for the cheap jump scare. Lit with nothing but flashlights during the night-time scenes, there is nothing legitimately and affectingly scarier than taking on James's point of view as he's stalked by a disturbed man in a bright red coat, a ghastly personification of the disease that's gradually killing him. Director Trevor Juras brilliantly uses misdirection to always keep you wondering where the camera, or the plot, might go next in order to maintain a sense of disorientation.
You don't need much to make the wilderness of BC look beautiful, and it's on full display here. What's tricky is making such a giant, expansive setting seem like a tight space that's slowly closing in on James, and that's where the skill in The Interior's aesthetic lies. It's as claustrophobic as a horror like The Descent. Coupled with the film's eerie, non-traditional classical music score, there's a David Lynchian feeling that there's something 'off' (in a calculated way) in even the most innocuous frame in The Interior's bizarre second half.
While it certainly isn't what you'd call commercial horror and doesn't provide a scare-a-minute jolts that such films often lean on, there's a lot to love about this twisted little wilderness advenure. If you're in the mood to work a little harder for your scares in exchange for something that'll sit with you a little longer, I'd have no reservations recommending an escape into The Interior.
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Check out Toronto After Dark's schedule, ticket info, and more here. You can find all of our coverage as it's released throughout the week here.
This
piece was written by Sachin Hingoo, a freelance writer when he is not
working at an office job that is purpose-built for paying the bills
while he works as a freelance writer. His writing has appeared on
Mcsweeneys.net, the CBC Street Level Blog, Ohmpage.ca, and The Midnight
Madness Blog for the Toronto International Film Festival. He has also
been featured at Toronto lecture series Trampoline Hall (which is
rumored to be excellent). His mutant power is 'feigning interest'. You
can read all of his posts here.
There's a certain kind of action movie that's a bit like comfort food. No matter where you get it, it's always familiar, welcoming, and that comes with a degree of predictability. And that's ok! Not everything has to push boundaries too much, as long as what's there is well-crafted, as I'd say Gridlocked certainly is.
Everyone wants mostly the same things from a movie like Gridocked. A few laughs, a lot of punches to the face, whatever is happening here:
Dominic Purcell does the 'got your nose' move a couple of times in Gridlocked
and maybe some of this
Pop pop! It's Stephen Lang.
without too much standing in the way. Where a lot of straight-to-VOD actioners go wrong is when they think they're smarter than they are, and fill the far-too-long spaces between the action sequences with faux art-school nonsense or overwritten rants that no one wants to see. Not so with Gridlocked! It's dumb (though charming) as hell but it gets to the fireworks factory right away.
Gridlocked might as well be a remake of the 1991 Michael J. Fox/James Woods action movie The Hard Way, lifting wholesale not only the storyline of a cocky actor being paired with a rough-edged cop as hijinks ensue, but the villain from that movie (Stephen Lang), who’s somehow even more over-the-top and unhinged here here than he was in the 1991 film.
Danny Glover is assuredly too old for this line of work!
The Hard Way isn’t the only 90’s action film that Gridlocked pays homage to. The entire film is a love letter to those mindless actioners, many of them straight-to-video affairs, that I grew up with. Lethal Weapon, so heavily ‘honoured’ here that Danny Glover plays the police captain (and of course utters his iconic line), is probably the most high profile of these, but the tropes and formulas are so familiar that if you've seen practically any movie starring Steven Seagal, Dolph Lundgren, or Bruce Willis when he was cool, you'll feel right at home here.
The one thing people will, and I daresay should, want most from Gridlocked is the action sequences, and I'd say they're better than expected, and at times approaching great. The fights are done in a surprisingly realistic way (in a lot of these movies they seem a lot more cartoonish or generally more choreographed, like a Van Damme vehicle), all things considered, and there's a variety of creative setups to be used as backdrops. Gridlocked mostly seems to be trading on the fact that it's pretty violent, even for this sort of fare, and the R-rating is well-earned.
Trish Stratus does a really great job here and might have been a better lead.
The cast of Gridlocked, while none of them could carry this alone, make for a fun ensemble that always seems genuinely into the movie and nothing is phoned-in. Dominic Purcell is fine as the lead, but it's the scene-chewing Cody Hackman, Trish Stratus, and the performances of both Lang and Danny Glover that make this one great. Stratus, in particular, does some great work here and shows way more personality than Purcell. A movie where these two roles were switched would be pretty outstanding.
If you're down for some silliness, a titanic amount of spilled ammunition, blood squibs galore, and you thought 'hey, these Fast and Furious movies would be so much better without any cars in them', Gridlocked might just be your new jam. It's got all the right elements in mostly the right places, and frankly, that's a lot better than we normally get.
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Check out Toronto After Dark's schedule, ticket info, and more here. You can find all of our coverage as it's released throughout the week here.
This
piece was written by Sachin Hingoo, a freelance writer when he is not
working at an office job that is purpose-built for paying the bills
while he works as a freelance writer. His writing has appeared on
Mcsweeneys.net, the CBC Street Level Blog, Ohmpage.ca, and The Midnight
Madness Blog for the Toronto International Film Festival. He has also
been featured at Toronto lecture series Trampoline Hall (which is
rumored to be excellent). His mutant power is 'feigning interest'. You
can read all of his posts here.
There’s always one. One film in each year’s After Dark lineup that leaves me stunned as the credits roll up the screen. I felt that way about Resolution, about Let The Right One In, and about The Battery in the past, and I feel the same about Shut In. This awesome twist on the home invasion thriller is definitely going to be one to keep an eye on, for so many reasons.
Three thieves, including a dark and villainous Martin Starr (Freaks and Geeks, Dead Snow 2, Silicon Valley), break into the home of grieving Anna (Beth Riesgraf), an agoraphobic who hasn’t so much as stepped off her front porch in ten years. When Starr’s character points this out, we are treated to what I’m almost positive is the first time a home invasion thriller of this type features an assailant throwing the victim out of the front door. It's certainly the first time I've seen such an act be a truly, affectingly disturbing one.
It’s a low bar set by bad reality television like Hoarders, but never has a hermit's abode looked so lush and beautiful. Shut In is consistently shot with care, attention, and style for days and nearly any still you take from the film is as well-composed as a painting, a massive credit to director Adam Schindler and cinematographer Eric Leach. It’s an easy choice to use a drab or washed-out palette like many films such as Panic Room have employed to great effect, but Shut In bucks that trend with the use of rich colours and vibrant patterns throughout. Like in Housebound, the setting of the mansion is the real star here, with each room in the sprawling, labyrinthine house displaying a distinct personality. As the film wears on and we see what lies beneath the surface of the beautiful home, it mirrors the tension being experienced by every character.
Every scene in Shut In is meticulously composed to wring as much tension as possible.
Beyond the setting, Shut In manages to overturn conventions by introducing the idea of agoraphobia into a home invasion thriller, which asks an intriguing question - what if opening the door and running outside is a scarier prospect than dealing with the invaders on your own turf? Riesgraf plays the agoraphobia and the general paralyzing tension so well throughout, and often without any dialogue at all. Martin Starr, known almost exclusively for comedic work, is truly frightening and unhinged here as well and I can't wait to see him break out into more serious fare after his deft handling of the role here.
With a tight script with several unpredictable left turns, writers TJ Cimfel and David White have crafted a story that fully immerses the viewer in the closed-off, internally tense world of Anna while presenting some legitimately new ideas in a subgenre of horror that has seen it all. With so many talented people at work on Shut In, this is one not to miss.
The pretty cool poster for SHUT IN!
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Check out Toronto After Dark's schedule, ticket info, and more here. You can find all of our coverage as it's released throughout the week here.
This
piece was written by Sachin Hingoo, a freelance writer when he is not
working at an office job that is purpose-built for paying the bills
while he works as a freelance writer. His writing has appeared on
Mcsweeneys.net, the CBC Street Level Blog, Ohmpage.ca, and The Midnight
Madness Blog for the Toronto International Film Festival. He has also
been featured at Toronto lecture series Trampoline Hall (which is
rumored to be excellent). His mutant power is 'feigning interest'. You
can read all of his posts here.
The best endorsement for an anthology film, I think, is when you leave the theatre wanting to see more of the segments on display. In the After Dark 2015 festival opener, Tales of Halloween, I can honestly say that I wouldn’t complain if every one of these ten segments were to become its own movie.
I’ve written before that the number of segments in something as bloated as The ABC’s of Death can hamstring the movie as a whole. While ABC’s whopping 26 segments is clearly too much, I’m of the opinion that an anthology’s strength is less about the number of segments than it is about the connection from one to the next. In Tales of Halloween’s ten segments there’s a great flow throughout - characters will pop into the background from one to the next, storyline threads will intersect in a subtle way - and there’s just this perfectly cohesive sense that all this nightmarish stuff is happening in a small neighborhood on one night, which is the intent. In no way does it ever feel like a slog, and the segments move with a perfect pace that suits the tone of each one. You can tell that some thought actually went into the order of these, which is as rare as it is necessary (that is, very) in an anthology of this length.
PSA: Don't withhold candy from kids, folks.
First up is Dave Parker’s Sweet Tooth, a cautionary tale about the dangers of eating too much candy. Managing to tell a monster’s origin story while fitting in a few kills is an impressive feat for such a short segment, but Parker pulls it off well and is a perfect opener for the film. Sweet Tooth features the first couple of really great performances by kids in this anthology, showing that a child with his parents' intestines hanging out of his mouth is, well, about as disturbing as you'd expect it to be.
This leads into Darren Lynn Bousman’s The Night Billy Raised Hell, an extremely dark comedy about a bullied kid pranking the wrong guy - Satan himself. A scenery-chewing Barry Bostwick as the devil isn’t something I knew I needed before now, but it’s brilliant. When the story takes a pretty abrupt left turn in the end, you’ll probably be surprised and horrified to find yourself laughing.
Next we have Adam Gierasch’s Trick. This is one of only a couple out of the ten segments I found legitimately scary and unnerving, as opposed to going for laughs. A group of friends is having a quiet Halloween, taking bong rips and answering the door for trick-or-treaters, when a seemingly unprovoked act of violence leads to...well a lot more violence, as well as a pretty ghastly twist. Tales of Halloween features a ton of different kinds of gore effects, mostly of the cartoonishly excessive variety, but the imagery here is pretty realistic and extreme, which adds some ‘legitimacy’ to the overall work, at least for some of the more hardcore horror fans.
The slickly weird world of Paul Solet's The Weak And The Wicked
The Weak and the Wicked from Paul Solet is my favourite of this anthology, and one of my favourite anthology segments ever. A gang of three stylish teen outlaws are terrorizing a hapless kid, when a mysterious stranger and his otherworldly protector show up to even the score. It’s a take on Sergio Leone by way of Rian Johnson’s Brick and The Warriors with a slickness and style all its own. If there’s a Kickstarter for a full-length version of this, they can have all my money.
Grim Grinning Ghost by Axelle Carolyn, creator of this anthology, is fairly short but effective. It’s basically the first and third acts of a story about a woman being haunted and pursued by a supernatural entity, elevated in its setup by the wonderful Lin Shaye. Grim Grinning Ghost is punctuated by an effective scare and is beautifully shot, even putting a fresh coat of paint on some pretty standard horror tropes. Despite its brievity, this works nicely as a centrepiece of the overall movie.
Imagine being married to this, and you're halfway to experiencing the madness of Lucky McKee's Ding Dong
Lucky McKee’s Ding Dong is one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen in one of these anthologies. It's full-on unsettling creepiness that comes from a couple’s relationship that is so dysfunctional and insane that it completely belongs in the middle of a horror film. When you drop that couple into a perverted take on Hansel and Gretel that takes place in two time periods (a year apart), you’ll feel like you’ve done a couple hits of unbelievably bad acid. Or maybe really good acid? I don't know what your tolerance is like, reader. McKee regular Pollyanna McIntosh is otherworldly here and you’ll have her voice in your head for days. This is another one that you'll be laughing through and finding yourself completely unable to express why.
This Means War, from John Skipp and Andrew Kasch didn't really do it for me, but if you're the type to sit, likely hungover, though one of those holiday decorating challenge shows on TLC or Slice, you'll probably get what's being referenced and turned on its head here. Two neighbors have very divergent ideas of how to decorate a house for Halloween. One, a traditionalist, and one, played by James Duval, with more of a darker and more metal sensibility. As you'd expect, these two ideas don't really mesh well and the cartoonish escalation of 'warfare' is good for a laugh, but seems a bit tonally out of place with the rest of the segments.
The main character in Mike Mendez's Friday the 31st. He's totally not Jason, folks! Honest!
Mike Mendez of Big Ass Spider fame puts his fetish for 80's horror on display again with Friday the 31st. Taking an obvious Jason Voorhees ripoff to it's completely illogical and adorable, gory, batshit ends sounds like a bad idea but...What? It sounds like a great idea, and though the execution here is a little amateurish, it's a ton of fun with about a dozen surprises packed into it.
The Ransom of Rusty Rex by Ryan Schifrin introduces us to two would-be kidnappers that get way more than they expected when they try to collect a ransom on a millionaire's son. What starts off as a pretty regular caper scene, quickly turns into a very different kind of pursuit, this time with the kidnappers running for their lives. This one takes a little longer to get going than some of the other segments but it's a wild ride once it does.
Hopefully they can identify the culprit in Bad Seed using this police sketch and facial impression.
Finally, we reach our last segment - Neil Marshall's Bad Seed. Though this one is a little on the long side and feels that way, once you get the joke it's brilliance can't help but shine through. Bad Seed plays out like a traditional police drama, except the killer being pursued is a living, murderous pumpkin. The fact that everything is played completely straight, even as people are battling this sentient squash, makes it all the more hilarious. This is also where a lot of the other segments intersect, as the police station is filled with references to the other nightmarish events from that night. When the segment and the film near its end, it becomes an homage to a certain non-canon installment of a classic franchise that should please horror fans that get it, and even if you don't, it works as a great final gag.
Interwoven with a dreamy set of interludes from the prolific Adrienne
Barbeau as a psychedelic rock radio DJ, the ten segments feel exactly
as distinct as they should be, while retaining a feeling of cohesion
throughout. I can definitely see Tales of Halloween becoming a Halloween tradition for me, occupying a spot on my shelf right next to Trick R Treat.
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Check out Toronto After Dark's schedule, ticket info, and more here. You can find all of our coverage as it's released throughout the week here.
This
piece was written by Sachin Hingoo, a freelance writer when he is not
working at an office job that is purpose-built for paying the bills
while he works as a freelance writer. His writing has appeared on
Mcsweeneys.net, the CBC Street Level Blog, Ohmpage.ca, and The Midnight
Madness Blog for the Toronto International Film Festival. He has also
been featured at Toronto lecture series Trampoline Hall (which is
rumored to be excellent). His mutant power is 'feigning interest'. You
can read all of his posts here.
If it's in a word, or it's in a look, you can't get rid of the Babadook...
On paper, there’s nothing remotely scary about The Babadook. I mean, honestly - It’s a nonsensical title for a movie about a haunted, spooky pop-up book for children, right? It’s truly earth-shattering, then, when this film sucks you into one the most deadly serious kinds of conflict one can imagine in a horror film - the question of how to reconcile the equal parts love and devotion to ones children, with the resentment and anger many feel towards them for the sacrifices they require. When this manifests itself as the batlike phantom called the Babadook, the result is one of the most chilling experiences you’re likely to have with a film this year.
In The Babadook, the widowed Amelia (Essie Davis) struggles to keep it together as her six-year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman)’s nightmares and misbehaviour keep her in a perpetual sleep-deprived trance. When a mysterious pop-up book appears on their bookshelf, strange, violent phenomena begins to swirl around both Samuel and Amelia, leaving both they and the audience wondering what’s real.
The film’s two anchors are Sam and Amelia and as characters, both pop off the screen in every scene they’re in. Noah Wiseman is exactly the right amount of adorable, irritating and, when necessary, skin-crawlingly creepy. Davis, similarly, goes through an incredibly wide array of character twists that perfectly convey the slow crawl of anxiety and outright exhaustion creating the horrifying hallucinations around her. It’s the scenes (and there’s a lot of them) where Davis and Wiseman are together, though, where their chemistry is nothing short of magical, making even the most hardened horror fan viscerally feel each tender scene and each horrific one equally.
The Babadook itself, springing from the pages of the twisted (and beautifully rendered) pop-up book, is absolutely not one of the ghosts/demons from lesser horror movies that spend the whole movie in shadows, only to reveal themselves in the last few frames. No, the Babadook is right there from the beginning, in both sight and sound. If you think the word ‘Babadook’ sounds silly now, I’d challenge you to have the same opinion after hearing the painful croak of it in the film.
Jennifer Kent’s ability to mine horror from the real emotion between a mother and son is rather unique, shared only by films like Lynne Ramsay's We Need To Talk About Kevin. With this deft handling of extremely nuanced characters and issues, I'm just going to say it, it's a goddamn crime that there aren't more female voices like hers in horror. Rest assured though, with more films like The Babadook, it'll be a lot easier for these types of voices to break through.
The Babadook continues a long history of Australian horror films that have almost always been thought-provoking, brilliantly-directed and acted, and of course, some of the most terrifying films ever to be produced. Joining films like The Loved Ones, Wolf Creek, Snowtown, Next of Kin, and a host of others, The Babadook is all but assured a place among Australia's best horror exports, and in my opinion, one of its best films of any kind.
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Check out Toronto After Dark's schedule, ticket info, and more here.
This
piece was written by Sachin Hingoo, a freelance writer when he is not
working at an office job that is purpose-built for paying the bills
while he works as a freelance writer. His writing has appeared on
Mcsweeneys.net, the CBC Street Level Blog, Ohmpage.ca, and The Midnight
Madness Blog for the Toronto International Film Festival. He has also
been featured at Toronto lecture series Trampoline Hall (which is
rumored to be excellent). His mutant power is 'feigning interest'. You
can read all of his posts here.
Time travel movies were, up to a point, strictly the realm of big-budget films where scientists with Troll-Doll hair and a penchant for exclaiming 'Great Scott!' would nag young Family Ties alums about creating paradoxes by screwing with their own timelines. After Shane Carruth's breakthrough Primer, though, everything changed. Suddenly it was possible to write a great story and use time-travel as a device to put a great character piece onscreen without needing any elaborate special effects. That's what Time Lapse attempts to accomplish and though it’s not a flawless film by any means, it gets remarkably close to the mark.
Finn (Matt O' Leary) is a painter and building manager for an apartment complex in which he lives with his girlfriend Callie (Danielle Panabaker) and the eccentric, scheming Jasper (George Finn). With tension brewing between the trio over typical roommate stuff like money and a dissatisfaction with work situations, things escalate after the death of their eccentric scientist neighbor reveals that he has discovered and built a machine that can take Polarioid pictures of the future. The issue of how best to capitalize on this information, if at all, results in a conflict reminiscent of Shallow Grave, and a situation where no one can be trusted. In particular, the need to re-create (or is it create? dun dun dunnnn) the future scene from the Polaroids becomes the source of huge drama and implications for the three friends.
Beyond the usual trappings of a time-travel story (paradoxes, the question of fate, etc), there's a really small but important set of interpersonal issues that are brought to the surface in Time Lapse, which snowball into a climax that leaves everyone involved with wounds both literal and figurative. At times you feel like you're watching a stage play, as the film is particularly dialogue-heavy, only a small handful of sets are used, and the characters are kept to the barest minimum. Callie's is probably the meatiest role here and Panabaker takes you through a rollercoaster of emotions throughout Time Lapse's running time, but O'Leary and Finn more than hold their own in scenes with enough tension to make any viewer squirm.
Time Lapse is the perfect reminder that there's a lot to love about minimalist, diminutive sci-fi. In a lot of ways the time travel/prediction is a bit of a MacGuffin, where the Polaroids could be substituted for almost any get-rich-quick scheme, but the dramatic tension between the three leads is more than enough to sustain the film. In a different time, this story would be right at home in anepisode of The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone, but as a standalone piece, it's a great little mind-bender that shows that time travel doesn't exclusively have to be the realm of Marty and Doc anymore.
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Check out Toronto After Dark's schedule, ticket info, and more here.
This
piece was written by Sachin Hingoo, a freelance writer when he is not
working at an office job that is purpose-built for paying the bills
while he works as a freelance writer. His writing has appeared on
Mcsweeneys.net, the CBC Street Level Blog, Ohmpage.ca, and The Midnight
Madness Blog for the Toronto International Film Festival. He has also
been featured at Toronto lecture series Trampoline Hall (which is
rumored to be excellent). His mutant power is 'feigning interest'. You
can read all of his posts here.
There’s a scene in Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter where the titular Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) stands, distraught, in her bathroom holding the remnants of a VHS copy of the Coen brothers film, Fargo that has been unwound and destroyed by her VCR. Before flushing the whole celluloid ball down the drain, Kumiko buries her face in the mass of film in a brief moment of feverish ecstasy, literally engulfing herself in the frames of a movie that encapsulates all of her hopes and dreams of a new life. No other moment in the film is this striking for me, and that's saying something in a film that's filled with striking and surprising moments. It's Kumiko's quirkiness, obsession, and complete devotion to her quest all summed up in a few minutes.
Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter opens on a lonely Kumiko mysteriously finding a waterlogged but functional copy of Fargo in a cave, and proceeds to show her growing obsession with the film, specifically the scene in which Steve Buscemi stashes a large sum of money in the snow near a fence. Kumiko rewinds and rewatches the scene countless times and uses the images to construct a map to where this treasure is buried and abruptly abandons her job, her nagging mother, even her beloved rabbit Bunzo, and hops a plane to Minnesota to pursue the riches she believes she's 'discovered'.
This movie hinges on Rinko Kikuchi (Pacific Rim, Babel) and her ability to effectively portray two characters — the withdrawn Kumiko of Tokyo who goes through the motions of being a participant in society but never truly fits, and the lost but heartbreakingly determined Kumiko of Minnesota who must rely on the unbelievable kindness of strangers to accomplish her task and claim her treasure. It's hard to argue that Kikuchi makes a single wrong acting choice here, always choosing the more difficult route of being subtle and spare rather than overdramaticizing the turmoil her character feels at every turn. This makes her few outbursts of joy, despair, and anger in the film seem truly meaningful. In short, it's one of the best performances I've seen this year.
Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter is nothing short of a gorgeous film that harvests beauty from both the emptiness of Kumiko's Tokyo and the austere landscapes of Minnesota, though this is all background for Kumiko herself, who's in almost every frame. The Octopus Project's score bolsters every scene with a dreamlike quality that puts you right in Kumiko's head when necessary. It's a stirring combination of sight and sound all working together to make this fever dream of a story fill every space in the theatre.
Before I watched Kumiko and immediately afterwards, I had no idea why this movie was at After Dark. There's nothing remotely resembling science-fiction, action, and certainly not horror here. Some would call Kumiko's quest a futile one — little more than the delusions of someone on the fringe of madness — and the last third of Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter features a host of well-meaning characters trying to convince Kumiko of this. But sometimes, when we grab onto something as powerful as a myth, it's impossible to let go, and that's why this film is at After Dark. We're all here - programmers, writers, directors, reviewers, and audience members - because we love film enough to follow it into the most unfamiliar and unforgiving places that it can possibly lead us.
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Check out Toronto After Dark's schedule, ticket info, and more here.
This
piece was written by Sachin Hingoo, a freelance writer when he is not
working at an office job that is purpose-built for paying the bills
while he works as a freelance writer. His writing has appeared on
Mcsweeneys.net, the CBC Street Level Blog, Ohmpage.ca, and The Midnight
Madness Blog for the Toronto International Film Festival. He has also
been featured at Toronto lecture series Trampoline Hall (which is
rumored to be excellent). His mutant power is 'feigning interest'. You
can read all of his posts here.
Though they've never been my favourite horror antagonists, werewolves have gotten a bad shake over the past few years. Showing up as little more than an excuse to get overly buff Magic Mike meatheads to shed their shirts and howl in teen-horror fare like Twilight and True Blood, it's hard out there for a lycanthrope.
Breaking modern werewolf conventions at every turn, Late Phases is a somewhat fresh take on the moonlit creature-feature. Moving the setting to an unlikely one — a retirement home — and casting Nick Damici (Stake Land) as a blind former veteran who's the only one to detect that things are going awry with his fellow residents is a brave decision on the part of Spanish director Adrian Garcia Bogliano. In addition, the pacing of the film is a little bit slower than one might expect, but it works here.
Late Phases begins with Ambrose (Damici) being committed to this old-folks community by his son (Ethan Embry). Damici comes off as a Charles Bronson type, a type he very much plays into as the film wears on, and seems out of place in a charming way here. In another trend-bucking decision, the film wastes no time in showing you the werewolf as Ambrose's neighbor and his beloved dog are brutally slain on his very first night. However, you don't see much of the creature again for the bulk of the movie. Instead, we get a film about a man completely obsessed with taking this creature apart. Ambrose purchases silver bullets (remember that he's blind and this causes some concern around the town), and commits to a training regimen that wouldn't be out of place in a Rocky movie (if Apollo Creed turned into a feral dog at midnight).
While this is all going on, there are some issues with the way this community is presented. No one seems as concerned as they should be with the violence that befalls them, especially the police, and as much as I'd like to attribute this to a larger statement about how the elderly are ignored and cast aside, I think it's more a matter of a tonal misstep in the writing.
When it finally rears its head again, the werewolf creature design and the rendering of the transformation leaves a lot to be desired in a movie as thoughtful and serious as Late Phases is presented by that point. This is one of my quarrels with werewolf movies in general — they’re so rarely shown as anything but goofy — and though Late Phases does a better job than some, it’s still asking for a major suspension of disbelief for a film that's taken a more measured tone up to that point. Ultimately, though, Late Phases is a perfect antidote to the common werewolf film, and a declarative statement that growing old doesn't mean you have to give up your silver bullets.
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Check out Toronto After Dark's schedule, ticket info, and more here.
This
piece was written by Sachin Hingoo, a freelance writer when he is not
working at an office job that is purpose-built for paying the bills
while he works as a freelance writer. His writing has appeared on
Mcsweeneys.net, the CBC Street Level Blog, Ohmpage.ca, and The Midnight
Madness Blog for the Toronto International Film Festival. He has also
been featured at Toronto lecture series Trampoline Hall (which is
rumored to be excellent). His mutant power is 'feigning interest'. You
can read all of his posts here.
In Nacho Vigalondo’s Open Windows, we're thrust into a world where people and situations can be manipulated by faceless hackers with malicious intent and a distinct lack of consequences. It's the world of 1990s techno-thrillers like The Net and Hackers taken to even more dubious ends, though despite being much more plausible and less like far-fetched science fiction in 2014, its premise stretches both the limits of what technology can do, and most unfortunately, what an audience will sit through.
Like another Toronto After Dark selection, The ABC’s of Death 2, Open Windows is somewhat hamstrung by its premise. The entire movie takes place on the desktop of Nick Chambers (Elijah Wood), as a fan and blogger who wins a dinner with his favourite scream-queen Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey) and is promptly rebuffed. Upon learning of this, Chambers is contacted via instant message by 'Chord' (the voice of Neil Maskell) who tempts him with glimpses into Goddard's most private communications, including full access to her cell phone and a camera trained on a hotel room where she's carrying on an affair with her director. From there, Chord uses Chambers as his eyes and ears in increasingly more elaborate and disturbing ways as he mounts a relentless pursuit of Goddard. As the title suggests, this all plays out in browser and Skype windows on Chambers' laptop, which do a serviceable job of moving the plot along (though the device becomes less and less credible as the story moves away from a static location).
The incredulity brought on by the story tends to snowball as Chambers leaves his room, laptop in tow so we can follow the action. There's a good effort here to keep things relatively grounded in reality and Open Windows handles the technology aspect of the story better than most, but the last third of the film attempts to do way too much while keeping the story confined to a computer desktop. A car chase and foot pursuit is well outside the purview of this device, and the former is too long and elaborate of a scene to be successful. I think most viewers will wish that the film would switch to a more traditional point-of-view by the time the film enters its final throes.
Elijah Wood is a good anchor for the film, which is fortunate because his face is front-and-centre for almost the entire running time. He transitions between emotions and roles seamlessly, and like his turn in 2012's Maniac, takes more than a few risks with his portrayal of the socially-awkward, easily-manipulated Chambers. Unfortunately, Woods performance isn't matched by anyone else in the film, least of all Sasha Grey. Grey, as in her roles in several other films like The Girlfriend Experience and Would You Rather, can't muster a scene with real emotion or gravity to save her life. Scenes in which she'd be expected to be terrified or dehumanized read as bored, and ironically, the scenes where she's most animated and most like a human being are the ones that open the film, where she's ostensibly pretending to act in a campy action/horror. Supporting roles from the other actors are also weak. It's too bad, because Woods performance is worth going out of one's way to see.
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Check out Toronto After Dark's schedule, ticket info, and more here.
This
piece was written by Sachin Hingoo, a freelance writer when he is not
working at an office job that is purpose-built for paying the bills
while he works as a freelance writer. His writing has appeared on
Mcsweeneys.net, the CBC Street Level Blog, Ohmpage.ca, and The Midnight
Madness Blog for the Toronto International Film Festival. He has also
been featured at Toronto lecture series Trampoline Hall (which is
rumored to be excellent). His mutant power is 'feigning interest'. You
can read all of his posts here.
You already know if you're going to watch Zombeavers. There's probably nothing I could write here, no revelatory tidbit of information, that would either encourage or discourage you from watching badly-on-purpose assembled beaver puppets viciously tear apart every piece of wood and flesh onscreen.
The setup is the same as you've seen a million times before. Mary (Rachel Melvin) arranges a girls weekend with the shit-disturbing Zoe and naive Jenn (Lexi Atkins) at a remote lakeside cabin, which is soon interrupted by boyfriends Tommy (Jake Weary), the effusive Buck (Peter Gilroy) and Jenn’s recent ex Sam (Hutch Dano). We’re also introduced to several quirky locals along the way. I'd elaborate but I don't think it's a spoiler to say that getting too attached to any of them is unwise in a movie about rampaging beavers.
The origin story of the crazed rodents is razor-thin, and as one would expect, is partly the fault of John Mayer (yes, that John Mayer in a cameo role). It's secondary to the point though, which is that these beavers are dangerous, completely relentless, and even cunning to a hilarious degree. Yes, these buck-toothed bastards are smart. Smarter than most horror villains, actually.
I think what elevates Zombeavers above the Sharknados of the world is the fact that everyone looks like they’re having a great time on set and with the material given. There are points in the film where the actors, especially Palm, Dano, and Gilroy, seem to be fighting to one-up each other, as well as the beavers themselves, in chewing the most scenery. It gets excessive at times, but movies like this have no place for restraint and nuance.
Director Jordan Rubin is competent enough behind the camera and is very aware of what he's doing, and that's all you can really ask here. Ultimately, if you're ever going to watch a movie in which a group of teenagers is overrun by unkillable rabid beavers who communicate with each other sonically by slapping their tails, make it Zombeavers.
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Check out Toronto After Dark's schedule, ticket info, and more here.
This
piece was written by Sachin Hingoo, a freelance writer when he is not
working at an office job that is purpose-built for paying the bills
while he works as a freelance writer. His writing has appeared on
Mcsweeneys.net, the CBC Street Level Blog, Ohmpage.ca, and The Midnight
Madness Blog for the Toronto International Film Festival. He has also
been featured at Toronto lecture series Trampoline Hall (which is
rumored to be excellent). His mutant power is 'feigning interest'. You
can read all of his posts here.
Though it's a feature of nearly every horror film out there, very few entries into the genre manage to balance comedy with genuine scares in a way that neither steps on the other's toes. In Gerard Johnstone’s debut feature Housebound, while the humour is certainly at the forefront of the film, the scares and the seemingly endless twists remain extremely effective and uncompromising.
After a botched ATM robbery, Kylie (Morgana O’Reilly) is sentenced to house arrest, complete with electronic ankle bracelet to prevent her straying, at her childhood home with her mother (Rima Te Waita) and stepfather (Ross Harper). Before long, the brooding miscreant is plagued by strange, seemingly supernatural happenings on the property, leading to the revelation that her mother has long suspected that the house is haunted. What follows is a series of twists and turns as Kylie, her mother, and parole officer Amos (Glen-Paul Waru) attempt to unravel the truth.
The titular house is as much a character in Housebound as any of the people that inhabit and explore it. Simultaneously sprawling and confining, it evokes Wes Craven's The People Under The Stairs as it serves to completely disorient the viewer with its hidden rooms and passageways so that, in the third act, you never really know where the characters actually are in the labyrinthine house. It works on multiple levels as well, as it starts off displaying a few cluttered rooms to bring out Kylie's feeling of confinement to the small space, and then more of the layout is revealed to show Kylie's gradual understanding of the house's history and the horrific events that occurred there.
Though I have a few issues with the characters — the mother and Amos seem to vacillate between true believers in the paranormal and complete skeptics every other scene — Johnstone does a great job of keeping you guessing throughout the 100-minute running time with enough twists that Housebound seems a lot longer than it is (in a good way). As you can probably tell, I watch a lot of horror movies and movies in general, so there’s not much I haven't seen, but I can honestly say that I never knew what was coming next in this movie. By the time the final payoff comes (and boy does it pay off), you’re almost exhausted from the journey there.
A New Zealand horror-comedy may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you're looking for something to watch that’s just challenging enough while remaining light and fun, but Housebound definitely fits the bill. A welcome surprise and a great way to open After Dark 2014, and Gerard Johnstone is definitely a filmmaker to keep your eye on.
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Check out Toronto After Dark's schedule, ticket info, and more here.
This
piece was written by Sachin Hingoo, a freelance writer when he is not
working at an office job that is purpose-built for paying the bills
while he works as a freelance writer. His writing has appeared on
Mcsweeneys.net, the CBC Street Level Blog, Ohmpage.ca, and The Midnight
Madness Blog for the Toronto International Film Festival. He has also
been featured at Toronto lecture series Trampoline Hall (which is
rumored to be excellent). His mutant power is 'feigning interest'. You
can read all of his posts here.
After an ambitious, shocking, mind-blowing debut with 2012’s Excision, most everyone that saw that film was salivating at what Richard Bates Jr would come up with next. Unfortunately, in what I assume was a reaction to the extreme nature of Excision, it was nearly impossible for Bates to obtain funding for a sophomore effort. Out of the depression associated with the closing doors he faced came Suburban Gothic, a film that attempts to make sense of the tortured artist unable to pursue his true calling. For many reasons, Suburban Gothic can easily be written off as a failure, a pastiche of quirkiness that attempts to draw from the Wes Anderson well too often, but it’s not entirely devoid of charm.
After the MBA his father demanded he obtain fails to land him a job, Raymond (Matthew Gray-Gubler) is forced to move back in with his parents (Ray Wise and Barbara Niven) and the town he thought he left behind. Raymond’s past as a picked-on fat kid whose secrets start with the ability to communicate with the dead and get stranger from there, is the central theme of Suburban Gothic and its unraveling is what drives the film. The horror is all in Raymond and his maybe love interest - we’re told this but there isn’t an ounce of chemistry between them - and their intent to cleanse their small town of a vengeful spectre.
Unfortunately none of the horror elements in this supposed horror-comedy are effective at all. There’s nothing that approaches scary here, and certainly nothing that’s as jarring or affecting as the stuff Bates put onscreen in Excision. Without this element, the comedy would have to compensate, and whether it does or not will probably divide people. Ray Wise is always good for a laugh whenever he’s in a scene (though his blatant racism gets a little out of hand for my tastes) and Gray-Gubler does a pretty good job of holding his own in his frequent sparring with Wise and the many other cameo characters he encounters (including a hilarious Jack Plotnick who I wish there was more of). Kat Dennings is, well, playing the single character she’s played in every film or show I’ve ever seen of hers. If you’re a Kat Dennings fan, that’s probably a positive. It’s not for me.
There is just so much thrown at the wall in Suburban Gothic, and there’s almost no way anyone could entirely love or hate it. For me, it’s almost exactly 50/50. I love the completely offbeat humour most of the time, and there’s a genuine quality to Gray-Gubler that’s endearing to me. That said, the horror aspect of the film is basically non-existent and forgettable, and large parts of the film, including many jokes, come across like someone wrote them on Ambien. People in Suburban Gothic seemingly just say the first things that pop into their heads, and that only sometimes reads as funny rather than simply quirky for its own sake. By the end of the film, the ‘whoa, random!’ element definitely wears thin.
If you told me that this was Bates first film and Excision was his second, it'd make a lot more sense to me. Excision is a polished, well-balanced, genuinely scary, important addition to horror. Suburban Gothic is the exact opposite, but it shows glimmers of the genius that Bates debut had on full display. For that alone, I say it's worth 90 minutes of your time.
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Check out Toronto After Dark's schedule, ticket info, and more here.
This
piece was written by Sachin Hingoo, a freelance writer when he is not
working at an office job that is purpose-built for paying the bills
while he works as a freelance writer. His writing has appeared on
Mcsweeneys.net, the CBC Street Level Blog, Ohmpage.ca, and The Midnight
Madness Blog for the Toronto International Film Festival. He has also
been featured at Toronto lecture series Trampoline Hall (which is
rumored to be excellent). His mutant power is 'feigning interest'. You
can read all of his posts here.
With the anthology horror film having experienced a bit of a renaissance with the V/H/S films (now on its third installment), it’s not any coincidence that directors/curators Ant Timpson and Tim League have gone back to the well for a second iteration of their popular ABC’s Of Death anthology. It allows for a titanic slate of popular directors to showcase their work in one place, and in many ways speaks to an audience that has grown up with things like YouTube and Chatroulette, where tiny bursts of entertainment can be consumed and discarded with little consideration for long-term retention.
The major flaw, and in my opinion it is major, with ABC’s Of Death 2 is its sprawling, ill-conceived premise. As appealing as the idea of 26 horror shorts sounds (to a horror geek like me), it simply doesn’t make for a pleasant traditional movie experience simply due to its gigantic size. With no connecting theme for the shorts (beyond the trite ‘letter of the alphabet’ conceit), it reduces almost all of the works to either one-note jokes or incomprehensibly banal gross-out scenes.
This makes me wonder exactly who or what situation this anthology is for. Sitting in a theatre and watching the pieces unfold at a clip, there’s almost no way you can retain all 26 shorts after the credits roll. Traditional anthologies cap off at around four to five shorts, which seems to be the sweet spot in terms of balancing a varied slate of ideas and direction with enough length for each film (and the viewer) to breathe. It seems to me that the best way to consume the ABC’s films is to watch them either at home, with the benefit of a pause button so you can watch a few segments at a time, or have them running in the background of your Halloween party where guests can drift in and out. Long attention spans are not welcome here.
All of this is not to say that ABC’s 2 is absent of quality. There’s some outstanding talent here and their submitted segments truly make you want more time than they’re given. The Soska Twins (American Mary, See No Evil 2) turn in the gleefully grotesque T is For Torture Porn which skillfully upends the Hollywood casting couch trope, and the crown jewel of the anthology is X is For Xylophone by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo (Inside, Livid) which is a moody, haunting little piece. Vincenzo Natali (Cube, Splice)’s U is For Utopia and Steven Kostanski (Manborg, Father’s Day)’s W is For Wish are also major standouts.
Again, though, the problem with ABC’s 2 is that the pieces I’ve named make up less than a fifth of the shorts on offer, and are not only buried by worse segments but are also backloaded towards the end of the film when almost any viewer will be burnt out. Other anthologies are not hamstrung by the need to have 26 films, many of which are terrible jokes (Alejandro Brugues’ E is For Equilibrium is little more than an unfunny ‘women, am I right?’ flop) fly by the audience over the course of two hours and they are better for it.
While I realize that the alphabet concept is the hook for ABC’s of Death 2, I wish that Timpson and League had, perhaps, chosen a word to spell out with the short films to curb the sheer number of stories that are thrown at you. It’d certainly prevent the overall piece from becoming Tired, Emotionless, Direction-free, Ill-conceived, Overwrought, Underwhelming, and Silly.
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Check out Toronto After Dark's schedule, ticket info, and more here.
This piece was written by Sachin Hingoo, a freelance writer when he is not working at an office job that is purpose-built for paying the bills while he works as a freelance writer. His writing has appeared on Mcsweeneys.net, the CBC Street Level Blog, Ohmpage.ca, and The Midnight Madness Blog for the Toronto International Film Festival. He has also been featured at Toronto lecture series Trampoline Hall (which is rumored to be excellent). His mutant power is 'feigning interest'. You can read all of his posts here.
With a full third of the theatre blocked off for press and the candidates staffers, Cinema 1, the largest in Bell Lightbox, has never felt smaller. As this seemingly interminable municipal election cycle enters its final throes, ArtsVote's debate between the three front-runners in the race, as well as 'fringe' candidates Morgan Baskin and Ari Goldkind, manages to draw enough people to fill both Cinema 1 as well as Cinema 2, where the debate will be simulcast.
Damian Abraham isn't your typical moderator. As the lead singer of hardcore band Fucked Up and the most recent and sadly, the final host of Muchmusic's recently-cancelled rock/indie show The Wedge, Steve Paikin he ain't. Genial and self-deprecating while maintaining a steady focus on the issue at hand, even as Chow and Goldkind attempt to slyly steer the debate towards transit, Abraham deftly keeps control over his charges.
The stated topics are four-fold; the role of a mayor as an arts and culture champion on Council, the creation and maintenance of affordable, accessible arts spaces, sustainable arts funding year-over-year rather than short-term, unreliable injections, and the fostering of committed partners in culture both inside and outside of downtown. There are also some pre-selected questions, some of which are read out by 'all-stars' from the arts community, like Katie Stelmanis from the band Austra and Piers Handling, the programmer and CEO/director of TIFF. No questions from the audience at all.
As a format it's a little rigid and doesn't leave much room for the candidates to banter back and forth. While this means a lot less bickering, it also seems to result in candidates repeating themselves often, and lots of statements go unchallenged. Morgan Baskin, who was the strongest and most sincere candidate on display here, unleashed one of only two major barbs in the debate, pointing out that Doug Ford has voted against most of the arts funding-related motions that have crossed his desk. He laughs this off. We move on.
Ari Goldkind has a lot of thoughtful points and is easily the most animated of the candidates, but a lot of his energy and time is spent exchanging with Abraham and, as mentioned, tried on at least two occasions (unsuccessfully) to bring up transit in an accessibility context and to put a green deck on top of the Gardiner. Both are ideas I'd personally support but are misplaced in a debate about the arts. That said, his position is otherwise fairly clear: the government has a role in arts-related policy but it should take the lead from the community and profit shouldn't be the only consideration. This, of course, plays very well with the crowd.
Baskin is the most thoughtful and passionate candidate at this debate. Possibly the biggest takeaway from her answers and statements is that she feels that art should be injected into the small places, and be considered in all or at least most of the design decisions within the city. She also hammers Doug's constant (and it is constant) references to the Austin City Limits Festival that he, Mayor Rob, Gary Crawford, and Michael Thompson attended last year. Her contention is that Toronto should be crafting its own cultural identity rather than lifting it from Austin, which is a great line and hit home for a lot of the audience — many of whom were, of course, local cultural creators and curators.
Doug Ford is uncharacteristically subdued, and has clearly been coached for this outing. He relies heavily on two points: the aforementioned trip to Austin City Limits with his brother and several councillors, and a mural he worked on with some local kids. The latter is talked about when Ford is asked about his 'most transformative experience with art' and while that answer is pandering and thin, it's better than anyone can expect from Doug at this point. The bar, folks, is pretty low.
John Tory and Olivia Chow both come out, naturally, as strong supporters of the arts and culture, and both provide specific ways in which funds can be allocated to these areas. There's not a ton of disagreement on these points and both advocate for stable, year-over-year funding and attainable, realistic targets. Tory has a neat-sounding idea about beautifying vacant storefronts and turning them into arts spaces. Chow calls on her experience with Artscape as well as promoting the awesome Remix Project.
And then there's the part you've already heard about. It plays out like the climax of Stephen King's prom-com gone wrong, Carrie. The bucket of blood teeters above Carrie's head, and there's a minute before it drops where you can't look away. Olivia Chow starts talking about her personal experience as an artist, and you think "hey, that's great, that’s the one thing she brings to the table here that no one else does."
Then the bucket drops.
Chow reaches into a folder and extracts a crude rendering of Tory's admittedly-flawed transit plan. The crowd groans. That other sound you hear? The faint hiss? That's Chow's campaign deflating a little bit. She is, sadly, a candidate in desperation mode and clearly throwing anything at the wall she thinks will stick. As someone who walked into Cinema 1 with Chow as my first choice, it's more than a little disappointing. Chow's latest poll numbers — keeping in mind that we're still a month away from the election itself — seem to reflect a downward trend that this progressive finds disheartening.
However, Chow's jab at Smarttrack is a valid point and should be the central issue for this campaign. We have seen how the ill-thought-out haphazard election year transit plan can leave us in stasis we can't afford, and throwing money down a hole created by yet another scheme will necessarily take needed funds from things like the arts.However, this was a mistimed stunt that shows a complete misreading of the crowd in attendance.
On a more positive note, Baskin emerged from this debate as — while not a front-runner in this particular election cycle — someone who should definitely be watched in the next few years, as a spot on Council and possibly the mayor's office is likely in the cards. She's articulate, extremely knowledgeable, and tremendously confident. If Baskin is the future of City Council and municipal politics, well, I think we'll be okay, Toronto.
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Credit to @ivortossell, @graphicmatt, and @goldsbie for their tweets.
This piece was written by Sachin Hingoo, a freelance writer when he is not working at an office job that is purpose-built for paying the bills while he works as a freelance writer. His writing has appeared on Mcsweeneys.net, the CBC Street Level Blog, Ohmpage.ca, and The Midnight Madness Blog for the Toronto International Film Festival. He has also been featured at Toronto lecture series Trampoline Hall (which is rumored to be excellent). His mutant power is 'feigning interest'. You can read all of his posts here.
