First up...
Piercing (2018)
Not yet rated
Score: 3 out of 5
I'm still trying to figure out what the hell I saw here... but I know I liked it. Piercing is a weird, sexual thriller based on a Japanese novel by Ryu Murakami that is dripping with homages to the likes of Dario Argento and Brian De Palma, in both its plot and its patently unreal, highly stylized visual design, which, together with great performances from Christopher Abbott and Mia Wasikowska, was enough to grab my attention even without fully comprehending everything that was happening (though I think I managed to figure out the gist of it). It's simply a feast for the eyes that, while a bit too opaque and reliant on metaphor when it comes to its storytelling, is worth watching at least once, just so you too can also wonder what you just watched.
Our main character, Reed, is a serial killer who hears voices in his head telling him to murder prostitutes. He's good at it, too, or at least he thinks he is, and even has a routine for going about it that he practices before his kill. And his wife Mona knows about it and seems... oddly cool with it all, though that could just be the voices talking. This time, however, his would-be victim Jackie, who arrives at the hotel room expecting a bondage session, turns out to have more going on than it seems, and quickly turns the tables on Reed. From there, the film turns into a twisted game as Reed and Jackie keep finding new ways to hurt each other.
Right off the bat, the film lets you know where its inspirations lie with a flyover of a cityscape of model buildings seemingly designed to call attention to their artificiality. Gritty realism is not what this film is about; instead, writer/director Nicolas Pesce goes for hyperstylization and vibrant colors to match the surrealism of the plot, where the motivations of the main characters Reed and Jackie are deliberately obscured, such that it's hard to tell who the film's protagonist and antagonist really are. That's not a fault with the story, far from it. Rather, it becomes one of the driving forces behind the story, as we the audience are given two characters who, while each well-developed and fleshed out in their own ways, are nonetheless at bitter odds with each other such that it's hard to figure out who to really trust. Is it Reed, the insane murderer with a hinted-at troubled childhood filled with sexual abuse from his mother? Or Jackie, the prostitute with either suicidal thoughts, a lust for pain, a mind sharp enough to figure out that Reed was bad news, or perhaps some mixture of the above? The layers piled onto these characters are hard to fully dig through after just one viewing, but I'd imagine that they make this film eminently rewatchable.
A big part of that comes down to Christopher Abbott and Mia Wasikowska as Reed and Jackie, two actors who were clearly relishing their performances. Abbott felt more than a bit like Christian Bale in American Psycho, a sharp-dressed man in a glamorous hotel room who fantasizes about murdering women all while it's strongly implied that he's not right in the head, and he owned that fact and played it to the hilt -- at least until things started going horribly wrong for him. Wasikowska, meanwhile, was a drop-dead mix of cute and sexy who manages to go from deglamorized to a fetish bombshell and back more than once, fluttering between those sides of her character with ease. Their chemistry feels like a mix of a serial killer movie, a BDSM session gone horribly wrong, what feels almost like genuine affection between the two of them, and plenty of other stuff that I'm not really sure I remember correctly, and which I'm kind of grateful for given how messed-up everything else in this movie was.
The Bottom Line
Dark but glamorous, Piercing is a throwback that's pure style over substance, but has just enough of the latter to leave the former as more than just a thin tent. It's pegged for release in December, so check it out when it arrives then.
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Next up, I see another Russian teen horror movie that, fortunately, went a lot better than the first one.
Deadly Still (Foto na pamyat) (2018)
Not rated
Score: 4 out of 5
Now this is the movie I wanted to see from Cursed Seat! Take a plot borrowed from a Goosebumps book, two acts of Hollywood teen horror cheese, a third act that takes all that and runs in a gloriously campy direction with it, and all the dialogue being in Russian, and you have Deadly Still in a nutshell. This is not a great movie. However, it is an exceptionally entertaining one, loaded with fun kills, solid production values, some cool backstory, an almost winking self-awareness, and an evil twist that put a gigantic smile on my face. It's not "so bad it's good" the way that, say, Truth or Dare is, but it manages to work within a very similar wheelhouse. I'll be the first to admit that it's a rather stupid movie, but it's my kind of stupid.
The plot: a bunch of friends, the only important one being the heroine Irina, head out on a weekend trip where they hit a moose and wreck their van in the process. Stranded in a desolate forest with no cell phone signal, they make their way to what seems to be a quintessential horror movie setting no matter what country you're in: a deserted house in the woods, where they find a camera that takes pictures of the future. Unfortunately, as the film's prologue makes clear, the camera kills any person or animal photographed with it, starting with its creator after a skeptical professor suspected that his demonstration of it was staged -- leading the professor and his wife to spend years experimenting on the camera to determine the extent of its power. And as it turns out, the house wasn't completely deserted -- somebody connected with the cursed camera is still living there, and does not have the best of intentions.
The most immediately noticeable fault is that the acting is hokey, even with the language barrier. The worst of the bunch was the actress playing Vera, who commits what is perhaps the cardinal sin of a horror movie scream queen: demonstrating, twice, that she simply cannot let out a convincing scream to save her life. Most of the other actors were simply forgettable rather than bad like she was, doing little to elevate the thin writing they had, though I will make one exception for the gloriously hammy villain. I won't say who it is, given that it's the subject of the big twist, but I will say that this actor takes the cheesy dialogue they're given and utterly relishes in it, looking downright gleeful as they kill off the survivors while cracking wise about the victims. This is simply the culmination of this film's greatest strength, its recognition of its own campiness and its will to play it up to the fullest. A monumentally stupid decision by two of the characters is outright mocked through a smash-cut from other characters discussing what a bad idea it is. Nobody gets the bright idea to take a selfie with the evil camera, fortunately (that would've been a bridge too far), but otherwise, this film has about as much fun with its cliches as it can without going into Scream territory of explicitly referencing horror tropes and other horror movies.
It helps that the logic of the film and its MacGuffin are actually kept fairly sound throughout the film. Outside of the one moment I mentioned earlier that even the film happily made fun of, there really aren't a lot of exceptionally stupid moves made by the characters; once they realize that the camera kills people, they immediately stop playing around with it. This could've led to the problem I had with Cursed Seat concerning the passive nature of the evil object in question (if nobody touches the camera, you don't have a movie), but the film managed to quickly solve that problem by introducing an outside (or is it?) force that uses the camera as a weapon. The backstory involving the Soviet Union having done experiments with the camera not only lent something of a mild pulp sci-fi feel to the proceedings, it gave justification for having actual human villains in play who want to use the camera to kill the main characters. The kills run the gamut from gory to silly, but are never boring, with bear traps to the neck, spikes to the eye, and even wild dog maulings taking out the main characters. Again, it's a film that knows what it is, and sets out to be the most entertaining possible version of that.
The Bottom Line
It's pure teen horror cheese, Russian-style, but an almost self-aware tone and writing that, while not particularly smart, didn't actively insult my intelligence made this a fun, campy thrill ride and a likely guilty pleasure, one that I did not regret watching.
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At long last, we come to the final film of Popcorn Frights, and boy, it's a doozy.
One Cut of the Dead (Kamera o tomeru na!) (2018)
Not rated
Score: 5 out of 5
The Japanese zombie comedy One Cut of the Dead wasn't a movie so much as it was two movies, the first of which made the second one that much better. The first half of the film is a zombie movie whose main gimmick is that it's shot entirely in a single take (hence the "one cut" title) -- meaning that the actors were actually playing their characters for a forty-five-minute endurance session with no room to make any mistakes. Then we get to the second half of the film, which isn't a horror movie at all. Rather, it's a straight-up comedy about the making of the film we just saw, which was made (in universe) for a new TV network dedicated to nothing but zombie movies that wanted to pull off something with an outstanding gimmick (doing an entire movie in a single take), and all the production problems that come with the casting of the film, the choice of director, last-minute changes to the script, and the mishaps that occur during production itself. It's when the film actually starts shooting that it truly lifts off into some glorious comedic territory, as we find out just where all the little quirks of that film came from; rest assured, none of them were planned.
The zombie horror film that makes up the first half is actually a pretty decent movie, all things considered, given both the obvious low budget, the pressure on the actors and crew members to not screw up, and the constraints created by the one-cut conceit. It's a lot harder to swap in a live person for a dummy when it comes time for their character to get bitten or decapitated, since you can't use the magic of editing to do the job, and as a result, the film naturally has to cut away from the most outrageous violence. The basic plot of the film-within-a-film is that a mad director decided to film at a water treatment plant that was used by the Japanese during World War II for bioweapons experiments, largely so that he can film his cast fighting actual zombies, which goes about as well as you'd expect it to. It's a pure madcap splatter-film romp, filled with memorable one-liners, outrageous scenarios, and plenty of blood spilled, enough to cover its threadbare plot, lack of budget, and fairly one-note characters.
And then we get to the second half of the movie, which is about the Zombie Channel producing an original movie whose main gimmick is that they want to film it all in one take. Recruiting a director (who also plays the director in the film he's making) and a group of actors, from a pop singer playing the heroine to a couple of crew members (including the director's wife) who were drafted into the cast at the last minute when the original actors' car blew a flat, they head out to an abandoned water treatment plant to film their movie. All hell breaks loose for them, too, but not of the zombie-related kind; rather, they have to scramble to stay one step ahead of all manner of mishaps, many of them happening with no time to spare as the camera is rolling. For instance, one of the actors playing a zombie shows up to the set drunk off his ass, and when you remember that that particular zombie vomited all over the heroine, you brace yourself for what's coming as you realize that that scene wasn't scripted. The amount of improv that the crew puts into the movie out of desperation becomes a very broad and deep well of humor, as everything from broken equipment to quirks in the actors' personalities comes into play. While the second half starts out fairly slow and dry, once they actually start making the movie the laughs are practically non-stop.
The Bottom Line
Beyond just the technical feat of the first half of the film, the second half was one of the funniest movies I'd seen all year. Definitely seek this one out.
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