My picks for Day 2 of the Nightstream Film Festival included a Spanish ghost story, a lo-fi indie vampire movie, and pure mayhem straight out of Indonesia.
First up...
32 Malasana Street (Malasaña 32) (2020)
Not rated
Score: 2 out of 5
32 Malasana Street was billed as a Spanish version of The Conjuring, a supernatural horror movie set in the '70s about a family being terrorized by a malevolent spirit. One thing about The Conjuring, though: while it may have been incredibly derivative of older horror films, it was made by a filmmaker who not only had a clear affection for them, but more importantly knew how to replicate what worked about them, such that, even if we'd seen all of these scares before, it was still a reasonably well-told version of such that still hit the mark. This film does not have that going for it. It's playing the hits, but only a few scenes managed to really hit the mark, leaving a mediocre film that told its story competently but never truly excelled at anything. This meant that, once it started getting into really retrograde portrayals of the disabled and especially (without spoiling anything) transgender people in the third act, it became a cringeworthy distraction that left me shaking my head.
Set in 1976, the film follows the Olmedo family, who have just moved from the countryside to Madrid to start a new life. The mother Candela works at a department store, the stepfather Manolo works at a truck factory, and the three kids, the teenage son Pepe, the teenage daughter Amparo, and the adolescent son Rafael, live at home with their grandfather. They soon find out why their new apartment had been empty for the past four years, as the last resident, an elderly woman who lived alone and died there, is still haunting the place, and doesn't exactly take kindly to her new roommates. When Rafael goes missing, the shit hits the fan, and the whole family is in a world of it.
There really isn't much to the "meat" of this film beyond a "greatest hits" of supernatural horror frights. The family members are all pretty conventional: the working parents, the creepy kid who's the first to notice the ghost, the daughter with big dreams, the son who has the hots for the girl next door who's clearly the ghost, the old man whose age and debilitation leave him vulnerable and who's trying to tell everyone that they need to get out, and eventually, the psychic who helps them fight off the evil spirit. Most of the scares are things we've seen before. That said, I didn't hate any of the characters, the actors were all pretty good, the cinematography built up some nice atmosphere within the apartment, and while the scares were awfully predictable, many of them still got me. One of my favorite scenes in the movie was one of its more creative moments, where the ghost uses the TV to communicate with Rafael and poses as a character on a children's puppet show. I also liked the bit with the eyes on the portrait that seemed to shift where they're looking between scenes, a nice, subtle background scare that built an unsettling mood. I would've liked some more creativity along those lines, instead of resting on fairly conventional scares for most of its time.
Because, once the third act arrived and the film got into the parts that really pissed me off, it hadn't really built up much goodwill to allow me to look past them. The initial red flags came with Maruja and Lola Davalos, the mother-and-daughter team of psychic mediums, the latter of whom is mentally and physically handicapped and who we are told is more in tune with the supernatural because of her "debilitated mind". That part had me rolling my eyes as it indulged in one of the more questionable portrayals of the disabled that is often seen in supernatural horror especially, but it had nothing on the big reveal concerning the true nature of the ghost haunting the protagonists. Without getting into spoilers, it embraces a hideously backwards view of transgender people that dives right into virtually every awful stereotype of such that has ever been written on the blog or Twitter feed of a fundamentalist Christian, TERF, or self-described "classical liberal": that they're sexual predators who ensnare unsuspecting men, that they're obsessed with taking young children away from their parents, that they're unable to function in normal society, and of course, that they're murderously insane and have no shot at redemption, even when you try to be nice to them. Until that big reveal, I was willing to give this movie the benefit of the doubt and a soft 3 out of 5 for being reasonably competent and well-told, but afterwards, I was slapping my head at just how hateful it felt.
The Bottom Line
It's a Spanish version of The Conjuring if it were written by circa-2020 J. K. Rowling. It has its moments, but otherwise, it's a hard pass.
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Next up, a vampire movie with about as few traditional "vampire" tropes as you can think of.
My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To (2020)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
A very offbeat vampire film, My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To is about as unsexy and unglamorous as the genre gets. The vampire in this movie, Thomas, gets none of the cool, special powers associated with vampires, but all of the weaknesses, and he's not the main character; his human siblings/protectors Dwight and Jessie are. He doesn't even kill anyone; instead, Dwight and Jessie kidnap drifters and sex workers, bring them back to their house, and drain their blood for Thomas to drink. Vampires as metaphor for some real-world topic is a common theme in such stories, with foreigners, the rich, and fearsome sexuality being among the most common, but this is a take I hadn't seen before: vampires as metaphor for disease, and especially what it's like to live with someone suffering from that disease. It's a dark, bleak movie, one in which the V-word is never even used and which sticks as close to gritty realism as you can get, and while it's very deliberately paced and not for everyone, I found myself pulled right into its world thanks to a great lead performance from Patrick Fugit.
In the world of this movie, the experience of being a vampire is not a pleasant one in the slightest, for the vampire or the people around him. Thomas is left housebound by his inability to step outside during the day, suffering severe sunburns from just a second of exposure to direct sunlight. We're never told how long he's been a vampire, but judging from his emotionally stunted, childlike nature, it's likely that it's been a while since he's been able to go to school or interact with anybody. But nobody suffers more from it than Dwight and Jessie. The siblings who care for their brother Thomas, Jessie is stuck in a dead-end job as a waitress while Dwight heads out in his truck to pick up unsuspecting victims. It's clear that the full-time job of caring for Thomas has destroyed their lives, especially that of Dwight, who sees Thomas as a millstone who's turned him into a murderer just to keep him alive. As the film goes on, Dwight's frustration with having to care for Thomas grows ever more pronounced, first when he decides to let one of his victims live because he's sick of killing for Thomas and again when it seemingly destroys the one chance he thought he had to get away from it all. It's a question that countless people who have been stuck caring for ailing elders or sick children have asked themselves: at what point is enough enough? When is it no longer worth it? Fugit's performance as Dwight starts out fairly subdued, but as the film goes on, it becomes clear that he's hiding a deep, boiling well of sadness and rage at the position that Thomas has forced him into. Ingrid Sophie Schram's Jessie, meanwhile, is more committed to keeping her brother alive, even as it slowly warps her into a monster whose concern for humanity slips away; despite being a human being, she's the closest thing in the film to a traditional evil vampire, in the sense of her being a committed predator.
Needless to say, this is not a happy film. There's no cure for Thomas, only more death and killing to keep him alive. And the mood leans fully into this, portraying its small-town Utah setting as a dead-end dump where nobody's going anywhere. Save for one shot of the sunburns on Thomas' arm, there's very little in the way of effects; the kills are handled in a very matter-of-fact manner with little shown. The pacing is slow, the film going through a number of subplots showing Thomas slowly wearing down Dwight and Jessie, from Dwight's relationship with a sex worker to a teenage neighbor discovering Thomas; it's not a film you watch for thrills, chills, or blood spills. It's as much a mood piece as it is a narrative story, specifically a very depressing mood that will leave you drained. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but it is a very long tunnel.
The Bottom Line
My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To is unlike most other vampire films I've seen, and while it was certainly an acquired taste, I still recommend it for its bleak atmosphere and its solid performances.
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Finally, we travel to Indonesia, which killed it at Popcorn Frights two years ago with Satan's Slaves, and this movie promised to be in much the same wheelhouse.
May the Devil Take You Too (Sebelum Iblis Menjemput: Ayat 2) (2020)
Not rated
Score: 4 out of 5
Well, well. The plot description that Nightstream offered made comparisons to The Evil Dead, and boy howdy, did they deliver. May the Devil Take You Too is a balls-out ghost movie whose plot is all over the place and can be hard to follow if, like me, you haven't seen the first film (titled simply May the Devil Take You -- nice pun there, English translator!), but given the pure energy and mayhem going on here, I barely cared. It is loud, in your face, and barely wastes any time getting to the goods, clearly aping Sam Raimi in a lot of moments but still managing to be its own beast. It's got scary villains, some dark twists and turns, a badass heroine, and a hammy, maniacal, and instantly memorable villain, and overall, Indonesian horror is now two-for-two in my book.
The plot starts up two years after the events of the first film, in which a teenage girl named Alfie found out that her father had made a deal with the devil. Now, she and her young stepsister Nara have both been kidnapped by a group of teenagers who came from an orphanage. Years ago, they killed their cruel headmaster Ayub, who was into Satanism and tried to sacrifice them all to the devil, and now, they are all being haunted by his evil spirit who's still trying to claim their souls. Since Alfie had fought the devil before and won, they recruit her to help them deal with this ghost. Nothing is so simple, however, and one of these kids has ulterior motives for snatching Alfie.
The writing in this movie is rather formulaic and on-the-nose, and there aren't many big surprises if you've ever seen a supernatural horror movie. The token skeptic in the cast winds up getting possessed early on, her corpse later having her "debunking spirits and ghosts" book conspicuously placed next to her. The teens are killed off one by one, almost like in a slasher movie. Many of these characters fit into archetypes straight out of The Cabin in the Woods: the hunk, the bad boy, the nerdy girl, the one with a hidden agenda, and of course, the tough-as-nails heroine. Going into the basement is never, ever a good idea. But when they're all presented with this much panache and flair, I can forgive the fact that the film's not doing much more than playing the hits. The assorted ghosts that accost the main characters look scary as hell, as do the characters themselves once they're possessed and start behaving like Deadites. The character who turns out to be evil all along was clearly having a blast in the part, hamming it up and cackling like a comic book villain as they explained the awful things they were going to do. And what would this movie be without Chelsea Islan as Alfie? When the shit starts hitting the fan, she wastes no time grabbing the first blunt object she can find and beating a possessed person over the head with it. It felt as though the filmmakers were channeling a bit of Ash Williams with her character, especially in her appearance; while she's a bit more serious than a Bruce Campbell character, she's still one of the most aggressive and violent horror heroines I've seen, especially once she starts reading from the "Black Bible" and starts harnessing demon powers to fight Ayub in a scene that felt like it belonged in fucking Doom.
That reference there shows you the kind of movie we're dealing with here. It ain't one for subtlety; while there are sequences where characters are stalked and have to hide, it's otherwise eager to show off its bag of tricks. It's very heavy on special effects, in terms of both blood spilled and the ugly mugs of Ayub's possessed victims, and one early scene uses the "Raimi cam" -- filming from the monster's point of view as it chases its target -- to great effect. The CGI is undoubtedly noticeable, but for what had to be a low-budget film, they manage to make it work, using the unreal-looking nature of some of the effects to feed the unreal atmosphere. The action felt a lot gorier than it really was, between its uniquely Indonesian depiction of what is strongly implied to be Hell and the vicious manner in which people get killed off. It all builds to create what can only be compared to a rollercoaster ride, one that is not shy about what it's all about. The ending also got surprisingly dark, not in a way that made it a serious downer but which still wrapped up the film on a note of ambiguity for Alfie, one in which it's made clear that she's never going to fully escape what happened to her even if we do get what can be called a reasonably happy ending.
The Bottom Line
May the Devil Take You Too was the highlight of the night, an hour and fifty minutes of breakneck horror mayhem that definitely hit the spot. If you don't mind reading subtitles, seek this one out.
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