Bloody Horror August
Ralph Kirchoff likes horror films that make you think and squirm.
HORROR/SCIENCE FICTION
written by Ralph Kirchoff
8/3/20268 min read
Housebound
Warm setting, satisfying script, good acting, reasonable effects, sharp directing, 3.5 stars. 1HR 47MIN New Zealand Film Commission, 2014
In a YouTube interview, New Zealand writer-director Gerard Johnstone noted that budgetary constraints forced him to write a script for a single location. This led to a “haunted house” concept. Drawing inspiration from Ghost Hunters TV and classic terror films, but wanting to mix “social realism with goofy scares,” he honed his story idea. And the “funny idea … lent itself to being a horror movie.” The resulting horror-comedy, Housebound, is a fun treat with dialogue and situations that will delight viewers. I’ll provide setting details and discuss some of the film’s unique qualities.
The film opens with two criminals driving up and using sledge hammers on an outdoor ATM at a suburban strip mall. After the criminal one accidentally knocks himself out with the bounce of a hammer, criminal two, Kylie (Morgana O’Reilly), completes grabbing the loot and starts dragging her unconscious partner away from the scene. Sirens are blaring as Kylie packs the getaway car and starts to speed away, but she doesn’t get far. The next scene finds Kylie in court being sentenced to eight months of home detention at her mother’s house.
The photography is clean and sharp. The courtroom characters are respectable and sympathetic. The New Zealand countryside is lush, green, and well-kept. It couldn’t have been filmed better if it were a travel advertisement.
The law transport arrives at Kylie’s mother’s house in the town of Bulford, and we meet Kylie’s mom, Miriam (Rima Te Wiata). She’s sweet and accommodating, but quite bumbling. Kylie must wear a detention ankle bracelet for the duration of the sentence. So far, everything is straightforward and cheery, but Kylie is surly. If she moves more than 15 feet from the house, she is in breach and will be arrested and charged. She doesn’t want to be there. Her mother won’t stop small-talking. She can’t settle in. Clouds pass over a full moon. Johnstone’s camera zooms in on Kylie’s angry face as horns drone. Intolerance is brewing.
While smoking a cigarette in a lower room, Kylie listens to a psychic hotline talk show on the radio. A woman has called in to the host to talk about ghosts, related noises, and senses in her home. At the call’s end, Kylie realizes that the caller was her mother. Cigarette in hand, Kylie walks upstairs and mildly chides her mother about the call. Miriam doesn’t like smoking in the house and doesn’t want to talk about her perception that the house is haunted. But she reminds Kylie that as a child she also thought the house was haunted.
In the next scene, Kylie hears pronounced creaking in the house. The camera work is delicious, with close-ups of Kylie’s face and pans across the walls and ceiling. The electricity in the house is staticky, and Kylie begins to explore long-unused rooms. She wanders into the basement and hears rumbling behind the walls. Meanwhile, she has to deal with a social worker visit, and she isn’t cleaning up after herself. Miriam is peeved but tolerates it. I’ve described a lot, but it’s only the first 15 minutes of a long film.
Electronic disturbances will increase. The diegetic TV music is unnerving. Kylie’s sense of the unexplained will escalate into fear. There are creepy jump scares. This heightened atmosphere eventually brings a ghosthunter, the return of the social worker, a frightful neighbor, and burgeoning peril. Fates won’t be divulged in this article, but while the film's tone is generally light, there are meaningful dramatic complexities. There’s way more suspense than humor, with sparse but good effects.
The house setting is warm and relaxed, juxtaposed by the film music, which becomes screechy with mysterious occurrences. The New Zealand accents are pleasant, and the characters are rounded. The acting is involving; you’ll feel included in the proceedings. Johnstone’s script must be credited for this. Overall, no film elements call significant attention to themselves, which is a good thing. Viewers should enjoy the ride.
As yet, we haven’t screened Housebound at our biweekly Bloody Horror Friday Club. I give it 3.5 out of 5 stars.
Lost Bullet
Not horror but terrific action, compelling perfs, fine script and directing, 4.0 stars. 1HR 32MIN Inoxy Films, 2020
French filmmaker Guillaume Pierret was fascinated by action movies like The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and George Miller’s Mad Max series. He wanted to develop a fast-paced, stunt-filled crime thriller and brought in former stuntman and now lead actor Alban Lenoir to help design and script the project's action sequences. With Lenoir’s involvement, Pierret’s story veered away from focusing on a crooked cop trying to track down an evidentiary missing bullet to avoid justice. Instead, Pierret created a new character, Lino (played by Lenoir), a “genius mechanic” who must find the bullet to prove his innocence. While no, it isn’t bloody horror, Pierret’s resulting debut, tense action film, Lost Bullet, is a cinematic thrill ride par excellence. I’ll describe the film's setup and some of its defining qualities.
The cast credits feature low electronic murmurs, lightning, and thunder as Pierret’s camera pans around a cluttered garage. Lino is welding a double metal support structure under the hood of his car. In the back seat, we see he has piped in four times the extra power for the car. He drives around the corner and picks up his young brother, Quentin. Quentin discourages him from the endeavor they’re about to undertake: “For 10K, there must be a better way.” Lino hands his brother a crash helmet, flips on the extra power packs, and barrels his car into the front of a jewelry store and right through the back. They survive, but Lino is stuck; his seat belt won’t release. Telling his brother to flee, Lino waits for the police; the sirens are nearby. Balle Perdue (Lost Bullet) appears in bold white letters on a black background.
In the next scene, lead cop Charas (Ramzy Bedia) and his commander walk into a gym basketball court for incarcerated criminals. About Lino, Charas says, “This guy, four layers of reinforced concrete couldn’t stop him … didn’t even sprain a wrist.” Charas wants Lino to modify his police cars to counter “go fast” drug runners.
In a fantastic chase scene featuring a head-on collision, we meet more cops on the team, Julia (Stéfi Celma), who may be of romantic interest to Lino as the story progresses, and Areski (Nicolas Duvauchelle). Areski acts like a maverick and seems to have his own agenda. Although the narrative is complex, we’re going to find that he’s the chief antagonist. Charas calls Areski into his office. He says hundreds of kilos of drugs are slipping by them: “I’m positive [the criminals] have info on us.” We can surmise that the leak in the team is coming from Areski.
Charas wants to go after the major “go fast” drug gang. He dangled early release in front of Lino and recruited him to help investigate. Charas also knows that Lino’s young brother, Quentin, is being influenced and used by the gang. We follow Charas and Lino as they get Quentin away from the gang’s garage. Areski shows up and motions as if he’s arresting two of the criminals, but whispered dialogue between the criminals and Areski reveals their real allegiances. Murder happens, and the incriminating bullet from the killer’s gun gets wedged somewhere in a car that Lino must find.
I’ve described the first 20 minutes of the film. There is lots of drama, wild vehicular action, and betrayal to come. All the lead actors are charismatic, even those playing criminal types. And special note has to be made of Lenoir’s understated and physical performance, which helped catapult him into superstardom in France. Pierret’s screenplay is lean and refreshing with a fast-moving narrative and dialogue to match. His camera work is amazing; the chase scenes are a blast … in more ways than one. The stunt fighting and driving satisfy on a level with the bastions in the genre, the Mad Max movies, and Steve McQueen’s Bullitt (1968). See it, you’ll be glad you did, but as yet we haven’t screened it at our biweekly Bloody Horror Friday Club. For its entertainment value, I give it 4 out of 5 stars.
The Sadness
Taiwanese horror, concept similar to Romero's The Crazies, terrific violence and dialogue, gruesome and fun effects, 4.0 stars 1HR 40MIN Machi Xcelsior Studios, 2021
According to online interviews, Canadian writer/director Rob Jabbaz created several music videos and shorts in his adopted country, Taiwan, when COVID struck in 2020. Against the real backdrop of the pandemic lockdown, he was given the opportunity to develop a horror film. His primary influences were graphic comics, and he wanted to use characters infected by the rage virus, the type of characters similarly found in George Romero’s The Crazies (1973). The resulting movie, The Sadness, is his feature directorial debut and, for horror fans, a fun film for the ages. I’ll try to relate the story in the movie and some of its significant elements.
Red letter production credits float by over abnormal-looking images of bubbly chemical cells. Are we in for some sinister science? It’s the morning, and lovers Kat (Regina Lei) and Jim (Berant Zhu) wake and talk in bed about their upcoming day. While Kat showers, Jim watches a news brief concerning the state of the Alvin virus. Many people feel it’s no more serious than the flu, but the doctor interviewed says that experts in the medical community are terrified, likening it to rabies. The interviewer asks, “There have been zero deaths. Why all the scare tactics?” Well, maybe we viewers can relax, nothing is happening here.
Jim feeds their fish and walks out to their apartment balcony for some air. Surveilling the high scenery, he sees a white-haired grandmotherly woman on a rooftop and calls to her, “Hey, are you all right?” As she slowly turns toward him, there is a large area on the front of her gown covered in blood. Jim turns away momentarily; when he turns back, the woman is gone. Jim’s next-door neighbor enters on the adjoining balcony. He is friendly and discusses his Tai basil plant, the stock market, and the ineffectiveness of doctors in the current viral conditions.
Jim takes Kat to work on a motorcycle. They see some post-violence police activity with an ambulance on a side road as they pass. Jim stops in a Tofu restaurant on the way back home. Internet comments note that Jabbaz’s script closely mirrors the comic book series Crossed, as the first full-blown horror action occurs in a restaurant in both projects. Indeed, Jabbaz points out that, like those in Crossed, his antagonists speak and taunt as they commit mayhem. At any rate, mayhem it is, and I’m not going to describe what happens in this scene except to say that “rooftop granny” makes a return.
Jim escapes his way back to his apartment, but what about that friendly neighbor? He’s now infected, and a body-severing battle ensues. The taunting by the infected, as Jabbaz mentions, is noteworthy. Throughout the film, the dialogue is sometimes more over-the-top than the blood. Jabbaz’s camera focuses on the enlarged irises and grinning faces of the infected in what can only be described as their enraptured joy.
Now it’s Kat’s turn to experience the terror. She’s riding in a full subway car, annoyed by an admiring older man (Tzu-Chiang Wang). This character plays outrageously later in the film. Jabbaz’s camera watches passengers stream by in the train car. One wearing sunglasses, affected, slowly raises his face skyward. Bloody carnage follows, with sharp weapons, bludgeoning murder, and people beaten to a pulp; I mean, bloody. Kat and another girl escape into a hospital building, and while the film intersperses moments of quiet, violence on the rampage is coming. Driven characters come and go, and eventually Kat and Jim have a reunion … of sorts.
In the film’s peaks, Jabbaz’s original and inventive ideas are in full effect as the horror builds to crescendos augmented by rising and sustained musical drones. The concepts and depictions of gore are so demented that a sort of lightness emerges, which might make viewers smile. Bloody Horror Club member Leo Dymowski said he loved the movie. Charlie Wittig agreed with Baltimore’s own George Stover that it was the bloodiest movie they’d seen. I reminded Charlie that we’d seen Demian Rugná’s When Evil Lurks, and that the scenes in that movie were as horror-filled and had a more serious tone. Anyway, we recommend The Sadness, and we gave it a strong 4 out of 5 stars at our biweekly Bloody Horror Friday screenings.
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