The political drama of this film’s release somewhat overshadowed the political drama inherent in the film itself. It was supposed to have been released in the fall of 2019, but when conservative media, not to mention Trump, caught wind of the premise, there was a huge manufactured outcry which got the film shelved indefinitely. It was only when Covid struck and the cinemas closed that Blumhouse released it straight to VOD, skipping the theatres and skirting the drama.
So, why so much drama? The premise is that there’s a group of well-heeled, pretentious, hypocritically self-righteous, Hollywood liberal stereotypes who kidnap a group of closed-minded, mean-spirited, red-state conservative stereotypes, bring them to some remote location and hunt them for sport. It had seemed obvious back in ’19 that the outrage was pretty stupid as the liberals were the bad guys (or at least the only ones directly capturing and murdering people), but to be fair, the red hats aren’t presented in a terribly good light either.
One person, Betty Gilpin’s (of Glow) Crystal, stands out as not being a flat cultural stereotype and that’s why she’s the protagonist. She was taken by accident, mistaken for a different southerner whose mean tweets had set the whole story in motion. She’s some kind of combat veteran, and while she doesn’t seem to identify much with the ugly socio-political views of the group she’s been placed in, she also doesn’t identify with being hunted by a bunch of rich morons either. So, she kills everyone. Everyone. It’s pretty great.
The politics is facile, peddling an obvious kind of ‘plague o’ both your houses’ equivalence, but at the same time, there are some easy targets on both sides to make fun of, at least socially. But, it must be said that this is a really fun movie. Gilpin is just a pleasure, start to finish. The violence is enjoyably extreme. Some comedy lands. There is at least one stand out knife fight. I only felt that, given its brand of politically simple, everyone is terrible, satirical perspective, it was actually too well produced. I felt that this kind of crude making-fun-of-everybody would just work better as a Troma production (I mean, it directly reminds me of ‘Troma’s War’). Some messages are benefited by less money somehow.
A classic Hammer Horror directed by Terrence Fisher (who must have done like 20 films for Hammer), this is a great, melodramatic, occult adventure full of derring-do, mystery, ropy special effects, and portentous utterances filled with rich, well rounded vowels.
Christopher Lee plays a proper aristocratic fellow who, along with a buddy, goes to visit a mutual friend only to discover that he’s fallen in with the wrong crowd—Satanists! There’s all sorts of dark magic: summonings, giant spiders, possession, evil eyes looking out of mirrors to hypnotize and dominate, big wild orgiastic rituals, and a goat headed devil making an appearance to his devoted followers before Lee disrupts the whole affair.
There are many twists and turns to the plot, but by the end, both Lee’s friend and a young woman who had been promised as The Devil’s Bride (The original UK title of the film) have been saved from their dark fates, and along the way is a rip-roaring, if occasionally rather stately, tale.
I never really got into the Hammer films, but I can see the appeal. You’ve got to be in the right mood (if you’re not, they can be too staid and, at worst, kind of dull), and if you are, they can be like a warm blanket and a cup of tea on a rainy day. This film didn’t have any real scares to speak of, but there were twists and turns and a grand sense of the battle between dark and light, all in a tidy little aristocratically British package. A memorably mild pleasure.
Well, Halloween’s almost here, and I’m currently racing towards the finish line for a Halloween show for the Cabaret I work with (more on that next week, once I’ve got some good pictures). Hopefully, we’ll manage to perform on Saturday before all the theatres get shut down again as the current Covid situation in my country is…not great. But I wanted to at least share some thoughts with all of you (if there’s anybody out there…) on a few recent first time watches. Yup, more blurbs.
The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave (1971)
This did not disappoint. Stylish, weird, psycho-sexual, outlandishly plotted and a bit too evenly paced, this holds up as one of the more enjoyable gialli I’ve seen so far (though I’m no expert in that department).
Alan is some kind of aristocrat who, having discovered that his beautiful red-haired bride had been cheating on him, seems to have killed her and now deals with his ongoing grief by luring ginger sex workers back to his decrepit castle/swinging mod styled pad where he tortures and murders them. One woman, Susan, we see undergo this ordeal and then escape into the night.
It seems that Alan’s therapeutic pastime is an open secret among his friends and employees, many of whom are concerned for him and the fact that he hasn’t been able to move on following the mysterious death of his wife. One of these, his uncle George, insists that he find a new wife and make a fresh start. So he does, marrying a blonde woman he meets at a party, Gladys. Then the spooky stuff starts and it seems that Gladys is being haunted by the dead wife, Evelyn. Actually, it’s been a series of double crossing plots by various combinations of George, Gladys, Susan, and Alan. In the end, all but Alan have been betrayed and murdered and he goes free.
The plot was actually surprising and fun. The film looked and sounded cool. And there was even a successfully chilling horror element in the way that power and wealth cause the world to turn a blind eye to this monster. I mean, the upper crust really doesn’t care how many prostitutes he kidnaps, tortures, and murders. They just want him to be happy and get over the death of his wife. I don’t know how intentional the social critique is, but it plays.
Sometimes you put on a horror movie to have an exciting time-get a little on edge, have a quick scare, have a laugh. Sometimes, you want to be enveloped in the richness of something just beyond understanding, and still have a laugh. This next film falls solidly into the second camp.
In Fabric (2018)
Peter Strickland’s hypnotic and delightfully weird outing is, on the surface, the simple story of a haunted dress, passing from one doomed wearer to the next, each meeting with a bad end. And it is that, but it is so much more peculiar and fascinating, so much more sumptuous and harder to ascribe a simple reading to. It is also mesmerizingly beautiful with stunning cinematography and a soundscape that both drapes the viewer in velvet and discordantly jars that same viewer out of any lasting sense of comfort, creating a succulent and disconcerting effect.
While the short summary above (it’s a dress—it kills people) may not sound like much, in actuality, there is a lot of storytelling to the film and its characters are given real space to breath. The film begins with Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a lonely single mother, whose nearly grown son is in a relationship with a much older, sexually dominant, frank, and domestically invasive woman (Game of Thrones’ Gwendoline Christie), shopping for a dress to wear on a ‘Lonely Hearts’ date from a newspaper listing (the film is set in the pre-internet-early 90s in an unnamed British town). She goes to ‘the sales’ (post-Christmas) at an upscale department store, Dentley and Soper’s, and is encouraged to treat herself to a slightly-showier-than-she-usually-wears, flattering red number by the lyrically cryptic saleslady, Miss Luckmore (Fatma Mohammed).
While she takes pleasure in her new garment, the date is a miserable failure. We are also witness to her many indignities at home, where she is disrespected by her son and his lover and taunted by their open sexuality, given her lonesome state, and at the bank where she works, where her managers nitpick the smallest details, such as the weakness of her handshake or the precise lengths of her bathroom breaks.
Many strange things start happening regarding the dress. Sheila gets an odd rash. While washing the dress with other clothes, the washing machine goes crazy and her hand is seriously wounded trying to deal with it. She is attacked by a dog while wearing it, tearing her leg open. Finally she tries returning the dress but is utterly rebuffed at the store. It seems that Miss Luckmore is both frightened to have the dress back on the premises and religiously offended at the notion of the holy act of a sale being profaned by its return. Sheila also discovers that hers is the only copy of her dress in existence, and that the model photographed in it for the shop catalogue had died. Before long, Sheila is startled by roadside mannequins while driving at night and dies in an accident.
The dress, having ended up at a thrift store (presumably along with the rest of Sheila’s clothing), is bought for Reg (Leo Bill) to wear on the night of his stag party. A soft spoken washing machine repairman, Reg is forced to don it by the unpleasantly bloke-ish guys he is obliged to celebrate his coming nuptials with, and somehow the apparel fits him just as well as it had Sheila. After an unpleasant and awkward night and a terrible hangover, the dress passes to his fiancé, Babs (Hayley Squires) and all hell slowly starts breaking loose.
The dress destroys their washing machine as well and after repairing it himself (out of step with his company’s policies), Reg loses the job that largely seemed to define him and is subjected to an oddly humiliating and almost sexualized loan interview by Sheila’s former managers at the bank as he seeks funds to make ends meet. The dress sabotages the water heater, filling his home with carbon monoxide as he’s enchanted by a Dentley and Soper’s ad on TV, before Babs hits the sales in the dress, where it seems to be responsible both for a fire that kills her and a riot that breaks out among other shoppers. Reg suffocates and Miss Luckmore seems to escape down a dumbwaiter with the top of her favorite mannequin, only to find herself in an afterlife sweatshop where all of the former owners of the accursed frock sit at sewing machines, weaving new red dresses of their own blood. There is a space waiting for her as well.
You know, just your typical horror flick.
There are so many interesting factors at play in this picture. Strickland has stated in interviews that he wanted to explore the relationship we have to clothes—what they do for us, how they make us feel, how we can change our sense of self, our identities with them. That is one feature. Also looming large, is a kind of satire of consumerism and work culture. But notably, I don’t think it’s exactly a critique—more, it pokes fun at something that we all, to some extent, take part in. The way we define ourselves with our labor, subsuming our personalities to the performance of jobs, the way we drink the Kool Aid of corporate jargon and workplace expectations, criticizing our colleagues for infractions that are otherwise meaningless, and then, in turn, how the money from that employment is purposed to further create identity with the products we purchase, the aspirational stores we shop in, the trying on of an elegant dress in a classy shop, having been upsold by an almost alien salesperson, so devoted she is to the grandeur and mystery of commerce.
Notable here is the empathy the film has for all of its characters. Often satire can have a kind of coldness. If a story directs the viewer or reader to examine the foibles of society, it necessarily puts on display characters who are foolish, if not downright evil. But Strickland paints each character with heart, while still leaving all of their faults on display. It is easy to sympathize with Sheila’s plight and her temporary happiness when she decides to be bold and, wearing the dress, present herself as beautiful, as a sexual being; it is lovely. For a moment, she is freed from her societally defined cage of middle-aged, de-sexed, single-motherhood. And it is also refreshing to have more than half the film focus on such a character. It seems rare that a Sheila really gets to lead a film, particularly one as glamorously odd as this one and Jean-Baptiste is excellent in the role.
Similarly, poor Reg is in a hard way. He seems like a man who has never really made a decision, but has just been pushed along by the current to find himself here. He and Babs have been together since high school and, while it seems there is little chemistry between them, marriage was just the next thing to do. But he is very, very good at his job. In laboring, he attains a kind of Zen state, perfectly balancing this part or hearing the way that part isn’t properly aligned. It makes sense that in the loan interview, the two managers get so turned on hearing him describe washing machine repair, given their reverence for the otherwise banal minutiae of their own vocation. At first, he is made uncomfortable and feels ashamed of being used as erotic fuel, but by the end, he gets into it and lives for a moment in description of his former work.
It is an interestingly fetishistic and erotic piece, though lacking in many explicit sexual encounters. Mannequins, stockings, washing machines, clothing—all become objects of steamy, tactile allure. The charge characters get from these objects, or from their participation in one side or the other of the exchange of capital, is heady and captivating, especially in concordance with the film’s rich palette, music (by Cavern of Anti-Matter), and an aural environment permeated with small noises and voices.
And, just as the film offers to swathe the viewer in this sensual allure, as well as putting forth moments of satirical hilarity, it still dwells in a menacing place, most evident in the inhuman, cult-like behavior of the employee-denizens of Dentley and Soper’s. At night, when the shoppers have been ordered to leave, uncanny rituals are carried out. Do they worship the items in their inventory? Do they control the dress, sacrificing their customers towards some nefarious end? Are they Alien? Demonic? Poetry made flesh?
There is definitely a non-narrative aspect, such that not everything is made to be read literally. Sometimes, the action rather serves as a kind of tone-poem, working in tandem with the other features of the film to achieve its nigh-hallucinatory effect. Fatma Mohammed does much of the heavy lifting here. While the dialogue and the staging intrigue, the way she sells Miss Luckmore’s devotions grounds every utterance and nuance, and elevates what could have been mere artiness, weird for the sake of being weird, into poetic truth.
Ultimately, Strickland has created an affecting piece, both pleasing and disquieting in which to sojourn. The comedy of its satire and the draw of its seduction work in equal measures, as does the obscure weight of its threat.
