Carnography

Killing Ground (2016)

With Killing Ground, I've realized that I've inadvertently ended up doing another theme in my last few reviews. And that theme is, Never Leave Your House.  Whether it's travelling down a deserted road, going on a hiking holiday in some isolated Nordic woods, or going on a camping trip, bad things will happen to you. And of course, today's film is also Australian, which along with Wolf Creek and huntsman spiders, just further cements my decision to never visit that country under nearly any circumstance.

Ian and Sam are a couple heading to an isolated beauty spot for a spot of New Year camping. They're expecting the place to be deserted as it is an out-of-the-way place, but when they get to the area they see that another family has apparently gotten there before them... although aside from their car and tent there is no sign of them. Unbeknownst to Ian and Sam, three days earlier a family had been camping there, but two local men out hunting boar had come across them and decided to kidnap, rape and kill them. Sam finds the family's toddler son wandering the area at the same time that one of the men returns to the spot to make sure they left no evidence or witnesses, and soon the couple is being hunted through the woods by the two killers, who are armed with hunting rifles, a hunting dog and knowledge of the area. Will they be able to escape safely and bring these killers to justice?

There's a scene in Killing Ground where the two antagonists, German and Chook, play a bit of a shooting game with an empty beer can balanced on top of their victims' heads, and watching that scene I couldn't help but think of Ivan Milat - the real-life serial killer who still seems to haunt Australian horror movies to this day. The connection might be smaller and vaguer than the infamous Wolf Creek, but it's still there if you squint for it. German and Chook aren't really portrayed as serial killers though - or at least, they're not already established as such as the film starts - and in a way that actually makes them more unsettling; two men who stumbled across a situation at random and turned it into something horrible for their own pleasure.

Rather interestingly, there's very little on-screen violence in the movie, but the film doesn't suffer for it. The key example of this is with the first murdered family - we see them being bound and led into the woods, and we know that terrible things are going to happen to them... and then the next scene cuts straight to the aftermath: father tied to a tree and mother and daughter lying sobbing or unconscious on the ground. It's clear that they've been horribly violated, but the fact that we didn't see those events ourselves leaves us to fill in the blanks, and apparently, our minds can go to some pretty dark places when encouraged like this. The way this scene is shot is also very effective - long static shots showing everyone in the scene, with the teenage daughter lying mostly naked and still in the foreground, makes a pretty bleak statement that stays with you for a long time.

Killing Ground's story is not told in a linear fashion, which wouldn't be too bad except that it's not immediately clear what's happening. So for the first 20 minutes or so it can get pretty confusing trying to work out what is going on and when. Non-linear storytelling isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's also quite easy to lose the audience if you're not careful and don't have some sort of indicators for what order events have actually happened in. Our protagonists are also maybe a little too sensible in their actions and reactions - we know that the best thing to do when hunted by an armed psychopath through unfamiliar woods is to get out and call the authorities, but deep down no-one watches horror films to watch people doing the sensible thing. And yet, the film's sensible streak falls to the wayside when it comes to Ollie, Australia's Toughest Toddler. He's wandered in the woods for one or two days, in 25-degree heat and with no water or food, then later thrown head-first to the ground, and yet he still toddles off again and his fate at the end is left unknown.

Killing Ground is quite a tense film, one that relies on atmosphere and character rather than scenes of torture and gore to unnerve its audience. It makes a few missteps - early confusion with the order or events; characters being a little too sensible for effective horror movie tension - and one could say that it's yet another Australian film where people in the middle of nowhere are hunted by killers with hunting rifles, but it's certainly not a bad film, and worth a watch if you're still not entirely convinced that the worst thing you can possibly do is go on holiday.

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The Woman (2011)

I think I'm going to give up on trying to plan ahead in my movie reviews. Every time I do, something happens and I end up changing my plans. In this case, I was all ready to start slowly going through the rest of the Insidious films and tackling the tower of DVDs by my desk... and then I hear that horror writer Jack Ketchum died this week. So I figured I should review a film adapted from one of his books, which in this case is the only one I've seen so far (even though I've read several of his books) - The Woman.

Chris Cleek is a country lawyer who seems to have the perfect family - his wife Belle, his teenage daughter Peggy, tween son Brian and youngest daughter Darlin'. He is handsome, charming and has many friends. But there's a much darker side to Chris that we start to discover when, while out hunting one day, he discovers and captures a feral woman. He brings her back to his home and chains her up in the barn, before telling his family that it is their job to "civilize" her. Chris is, in fact, a misogynistic wife-beater and abuser, who has even made Peggy pregnant through sexual abuse, and it is clear that he just wants the Woman as another sex slave. Even worse, his son Brian is following in his father's footsteps. The only hope the Woman has to escape is Peggy, who despite her fear of her father still wants to try to prevent her father from abusing anyone else... and perhaps the Woman is Peggy's only hope for escape as well...

The Woman is directed by Lucky McKee, who is both known for having done several adaptations of Ketchum's works, and for being a feminist filmmaker. From that and from the synopsis above it should be pretty obvious that The Woman is a film with strong feminist themes, and for the most part, it manages to get those themes across with few problems (and I'll get to them shortly). There's the key theme of how this outwardly respectable and charming man, a pillar of his community, is, in reality, a monster, being compared with the feral and cannibalistic Woman. Who is the real monster, the savage? Well, obviously, it's Chris Cleek, and maybe the film does lay it on rather thick, especially with a revelation at the film's climax that goes over the line into absurdity, but this isn't just man V woman; it's also nature V nurture - the Woman, for all her feral and cannibalistic ways, is still a better person than the "civilised" man.

The Woman is also a sequel to one of Jack Ketchum's earlier works, The Offspring, which was also made into a movie, Offspring. The story concerns a clan of feral cannibals who live in the woods and caves of Northeast America, capturing and eating any campers and tourists unlucky enough to stumble into their territory. At the end of Offspring, only the Woman is left alive, which leads her into this movie. So, of course, this film contains some pretty gruesome and splattery scenes of violence and cannibalism - although not as many as you might think because there's also a lot of violence - both sexual and otherwise - directed against the Woman by Chris and, in one particularly uncomfortable scene, Brian Cleek (and that scene should be uncomfortable, considering Brian's age, even though in reality we actually see very little of it).

I really like The Woman, both as a straight horror movie and as a feminist piece, but there is one scene in it that I take great issue with. At one point in the film, Chris and his wife Belle are washing the Woman while she is chained to the barn wall, and our attention is drawn to the fact that one of the chains holding her is coming loose. Belle also notices this, but rather than keeping quiet about it she alerts her husband, thus preventing an early escape for the Woman. The film then seems to mark Belle as deserving of the same "punishment" as her husband for this, for not helping her fellow woman... and oh boy is that problematic. Belle is quite clearly, from the moment we meet her, a woman who has been beaten into the dirt by her husband. She is as much a victim as Peggy and the Woman - maybe even more so because she's too terrified of her husband to dare do anything that might cause him a problem. Her acting out of fear should not condemn her to the same fate as those who rape and torture and kill, and I think the film made a misstep in doing that. There's also the character of Peggy's teacher, who seems to be set up to be a potential saviour but really just gets a variation of the Scatman Crothers Special and becomes another woman to be tortured at the end.

Special mention has to go to Pollyanna McIntosh, who plays the Woman. She has no lines (well, none in English) and communicates entirely in grunts and gestures throughout the entire film, and yet comes across so strongly that it's incredible. Writing a feral cannibal murderer to be sympathetic might be difficult enough, but to portray that character successfully is another thing entirely. Angela Bettis, who is in several other Lucky McKee films, plays the role of Belle and is quite effective as well as an abused, beaten-down wife trying to survive and protect her children, even if she can only do so in the smallest ways.

The Woman won't be for everyone, with its themes of abuse and the extreme gore in the film's climax, but it's definitely a film I think people should at least try to watch - or at least get hold of the trilogy of books - Off Season, The Offspring and The Woman - that Jack Ketchum wrote.

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Bound to Vengeance (2015)

Continuing with the task of putting a dent in the pile of DVDs and Blu-Rays that I've managed to accumulate but not yet watch, and I swear that I'm picking the movies randomly and not trying to put together any particular theme, such as "Women in Peril" or something similar. Although you'd be forgiven for thinking so with this review of the latest film, Bound to Vengeance.

A young woman, Eve, has been kidnapped, chained up and brutalised in a dirty basement, apparently for some time. When her captor brings her food she manages to surprise him with a brick to the head and escapes her chains and the house, only to discover that she's in the middle of nowhere. While looking for another way to escape she also finds Polaroids of other girls that her captor is apparently holding elsewhere, and so Eve decides that she has to free them. A psychological game then begins between Eve and her "former" captor Phil, as she threatens and forces him to take her to the other girls so that she can free them like she did herself, whilst he tries to keep her off-balance and trick her whenever he can to regain the upper hand. Will Eve be able to rescue the other girls and avenge them - and herself - or will her captor and the odds be against her?

I think I've mentioned before that I'm not the biggest fan of the rape-revenge subgenre, primarily because the majority of films take the time to show us the "rape" part in exploitative, uncomfortable detail, which usually leads to an unpleasant watch. Bound to Vengeance doesn't do that, however - after a brief shot of home movie footage to introduce us to Eve (a recurring motif in the film, but more on that later), we then get a cold open of her captor making her soup and Eve launching her escape plan. I can appreciate this in a rape-revenge movie - the filmmakers seem to be assuming that we can probably figure out what horrible things Eve (and later the other girls) have already gone through just from the setting and situation they're in, and so they only show us the bare minimum and focus more on the revenge aspect instead.

So, I think we can safely say that Bound to Vengeance is a feminist film. At no point in the film does Eve turn to, rely on or need the help of any males - police, boyfriend or passers-by included. The only person who does join her in her quest is one of the rescued girls, Lea, who is equally as determined to survive. But here's the problem - the complete lack of sympathetic male characters pushes the film out of feminist territory and into misandristic territory. Every male we meet (until the very end when some cops appear) are sexual predators who have been kidnapping women for their own purposes, whether to sell on or for their own pleasure. "Look at all these terrible men!" the film seems to say. "You can't trust a single one of them! Only trust your fellow women, they won't let you down." And misandry is, of course, just as bad as misogyny and leaves just as bad a taste in my mouth.

The film also treats two of the women that Eve tries to rescue as cruel punchlines. "He he, this one's got Stockholm Syndrome and tries to kill Eve because her captor says so!" it says at one point. Yes, it's all part of the psychological war that's going on between Eve and Phil - he trying constantly to regain the advantage over Eve by any means possible, including using the other captive girls against her - but the way it's paced feels almost like splattery slapstick. There's also the backstory between Eve and the other girl she was held captive with, who we see at the beginning has died... but we have to wait till the end of the film to discover her connection to Eve and thus the whole reason why she is so hell-bent on freeing the other women. Phil periodically makes comments about the dead girl to try to upset Eve, but because we don't fully understand the connection it doesn't actually mean all that much to us.

Finally, there's the use of the home video footage of "happier times" throughout the film. It's an interesting way of introducing backstory for our protagonist, certainly, but we keep getting little flashes of it throughout the film, sometimes at inappropriate moments, and a lot of the time we're just seeing the same clips in a different order. And again, it takes till the very end of the film to reveal what it all means. It's not the best way of filling in the backstory for your characters.

Bound to Vengeance is certainly one of the better rape-revenge movies I've seen, and it has some interesting ideas and ways of presenting them. But it's undercurrent of man-hating and its awkward pacing let it down (not to mention some confusing revelations near the end which feel almost like they were rushed through at the last minute).

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The Last House on the Left (1972)

In 1971 a young filmmaker by the name of Sean S. Cunningham was working on a movie called Together, which in turn was a remake of his "white coater" film The Art of Marriage. While working on Together, Cunningham met Wes Craven, who was working as an editor on the film, and the two became friends. When Cunningham was given $90,000 to make a "scary movie" by his distributors, the two decided to work together on it, with Craven directing. The movie that came out of this was The Last House on the Left.

Mari Collingwood is celebrating her 17th birthday. Her parents are planning a birthday party for her, but Mari is also going to see a band called Bloodlust with her friend Phyllis. Her parents disapprove, but let her go anyway. Unfortunately, the girls never make it to the concert - whilst trying awkwardly to buy some pot, they fall into the clutches of the recently-escaped Krug Stillo and the rest of his gang: child molester Fred; Sadie, who once kicked a police dog to death; and Junior, Krug's son whom Krug got addicted to heroin so as to control him better. Mari and Phyllis are subjected to a never-ending torrent of abuse, assault, humiliation and rape, it all climaxing in the woods just a few hundred yards from Mari's home, where her parents are putting the finishing touches on her birthday cake and waiting for her to come home...

"To avoid fainting, keep repeating: it's only a movie... only a movie... only a movie..." screamed the marketing for The Last House on the Left, because they knew that audiences would not have seen anything like this before. The film was loosely based on Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, which in turn was based on a Swedish ballad: but this movie is no fairy tale or piece of beautiful cinematography. Craven's directorial debut is an uncomfortable and grimy exploitation horror film that sets out to make its audience squirm in their seats as they watch its depictions of rape, violence and murder, as well as comparing the polar extremes of Krug and his gang's cruel and animalistic natures with the liberal, civilised world of the Collingwoods, especially as we can see how they're fated to collide. It's a concept that Craven came back to several times during his career - the liberal, suburban family coming up against feral murderers - in films like The Hills Have Eyes and The People Under the Stairs, albeit from different angles.

With it being Craven's first film, there are of course some flaws to it. Chief among them is the way that Krug and Company (one of the film's alternate titles) are portrayed - they're just too over-the-top in their evilness. You've got a child molester and murderer; a woman so mean she kicked a police dog to death; a heroin junkie who was hooked on the stuff by his own father (unsurprisingly, he's the most sympathetic of the four); and Krug himself... a rapist and serial killer, recently escaped from prison, and the first time we see him he pops a child's balloon with a cigar. We get it movie, they're bad people! In an attempt to contrast the villains with the peaceful, "good" Collingwoods, the film goes too far, and has them become caricatures rather than believable antagonists. It also jars with the moment of almost-guilt they seem to have after committing one of their atrocities. Another flaw of the film is the inclusion of the two bumbling comic relief police officers, complete with their own comedy sound track. Not only do most of their scenes stick out awkwardly against the rest of the film, but they could be easily removed and the film would lose very little of importance.

In The Last House on the Left, Krug is played by David Hess, and to say they he ended up being a bit typecast in film and TV afterwards is a bit of an understatement. He later starred in films such as The House on the Edge of the Park, where he plays pretty much the same character as here, and other films like Hitch Hike and various TV shows, where he nearly always played the villain of the episode. Hess also did the score for The Last House on the Left, and while I could live without the bumbling cops' theme his other tracks, such as the haunting The Road Leads to Nowhere, are very good indeed.

Of course, you can't talk about The Last House on the Left without mentioning its video nasty status. It was of course one of the 72 films caught up in the UK moral panic of the early 1980s, and was also one of the last to finally get a fully uncut re-release in 2008. In fact, when it was up for approval by the BBFC in 2002 film critic Mark Kermode spoke in its defense in an appeal to get 16 seconds of cuts waived, talking of the film's historical significance. Afterwards the BBFC made it 30 seconds of cuts instead. The Last House on the Left is a brutal, unflinching and unpleasant film to watch, because Craven and Cunningham set out to make a film where the violence and gore was as realistic and uncomfortable to watch as possible. the fact that the film garnered so much controversy and for so long is a mark of their success in that. It's certainly not a film for everyone, but for horror fans, those interested in the history of the genre or in the video nasties phenomenon, it's pretty much required viewing.

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Storm Warning (2007)

After Nick and I saw the movie Wolf Creek (which I swear I'll get round to reviewing one day) several years ago, he swore he was never visiting Australia. The country was out to kill everyone who set foot on it, according to him; between all the deadly animals, the inhospitability of the bush, and the brutality of the serial killers. So it's probably a good thing that he never got to see Storm Warning, because it surely would have broken his brain completely as to Australia's potential safety.

(Ironically, a trailer for Wolf Creek was on the rental DVD of this film.)

Pia and Rob are a married couple on a holiday on the coast. He's a barrister and she's a (French) artist, so their yuppie credentials are established very early on. They hire a little wooden boat for a day of fishing, but end up lost and caught in a storm. Trying to find shelter and/or a phone, they run into a trio of psycho hillbillies beating a man to death, then manage to compound their bad luck by breaking into the psycho hillbillies' home and discovering the shed full of marijuana they're growing. When the psycho hillbillies inevitably find them, they spend a while mocking and tormenting them in increasingly sadistic ways, before things inevitably turn to plans to rape Pia (and possibly Rob as well, in a Deliverance-esque later moment). They break Rob's leg for attempting to escape and lock the two of them in a barn to deal with them later, and so it's up to Pia to build a series of traps for their captors and escape the farm with her husband...

We're only about five or so minutes into the film before we learn that Pia is: (a) French; (b) an artist; (c) beautiful; and (d) a good cook. I'm pretty sure that's a bingo on the Foreign Female Leads in Movies card, as well as a checklist of things that will become relevant later in the movie (because you just know she's not a portrait painter, of course). The film also shows us later on that Pia is horrified by the idea of killing anything, even a fish they catch, so we know from that scene that she's going to end up racking up quite a body count by the end of the film (although personally I have more of a problem with the fact that two people who knew they were going for a day of fishing didn't bring a priest or anything similar to finish off the fish with).

But once Pia does get over her unwillingness to kill (after she is forced to kill a baby wallaby, so warning there for the squeamish animals lovers), she goes into proper Badass Female Protgonist mode, building herself an anti-rape diaphragm that will make most of the audience at least wince when it comes into play, and setting up a network of rusty metal tools, fishing wire and fish hooks in the shed that, when set off, wouldn't look out of place in a Cenobite dungeon. Rob, on the other hand, gets to be pretty much useless for most of the film. Even before his leg gets broken he keeps thinking he can talk or buy his way out of the situation, which just keeps making matters worse as his yuppie lawyer-speak just makes the psycho hillbillies angrier. And once his leg is broken the best he can do is shout encouragement to his wife while she does all the hard work. And just in case we missed the point, the psycho hillbilles' house is covered with centerfold pinups and at one point two of them sit around watching horse porn (thankfully we don't see any of the actual porn, just a shot of a horse and Poppy Hillbilly playing with himself through his trousers), so they certainly don't have a high opinion of women - thus making it even more important for the female protagonist to fight back against the misogynists. Storm Warning is definitely a film about female empowerment, as cliched as it is in places.

One of the most surprising things about this film for me, though, is the fact that it was directed by the same guy who directed Urban Legend and Valentine, which can be described as mediocre at best. Apparently third time was the charm for Jamie Blanks, as Storm Warning is a tense (for the most part) and well put-together film. It doesn't skimp on the gore when it's necessary and while characters occasionally seem to have been hit over the head with the Big Book of Character Tropes, it does pretty well with a cast that can be counted on one hand.

Finally, we have multiple Chekovs in this film: Chekov's Ambiguous Art Career; Chekov's Rottweiler Trained to Attack Bleeding Humans, and of course Chekov's Anti-Rape Diaphragm (as mentioned earlier). Could this be a new record?

 

The ABCs of Death 2 (2014)

Well hey, will you look at this. I'm actually reviewing something in a relatively quick and current turnaround - The ABCs of Death 2 only hit the streaming sites this week. It's also not been long since I reviewed the first one as well, so a lot of things are still fresh in my mind.

As you will have gathered if you read my review of the first ABCs of Death anthology, I found it to be somewhat hit-and-miss and more than a little disappointing. The former complaint is a common pitfall in anthology horror, because very rarely are you going to enjoy every segment (especially in cases such as this, when there are 26 short films to take in); the latter complaint however comes from finding some shorts not just be disappointing, but outright bad or even offensive. Well thankfully, the sequel has tightened things up considerably and the quality of the shorts has improved a lot as well. Not every short is going to meet with everyone's approval still, of course, and there's still the occasional questionable short, but overall the sequel is better than the original.

Like my first review, rather than go through all 26 short films I'm just going to cover the ones that stood out to me the most, for good or bad reasons.

C is for Capital Punishment - I admit it; I liked this one because of personal views. I felt it really showed the flaws in the capital punishment system (yes, I went there) in a pretty bleak, memorable way.

D is for Deloused - I didn't like this one. I didn't like the animation style, I found the story (short though it was) confusing, and there were insects. Yeek.

G is for Grandad - This was a mindfuck of a short; deeply creepy, and deeply amusing. It was wonderfully surreal while still managing to stay grounded in reality and was one of my favourite shorts of the entire anthology.

J is for Jesus - Ooh, this one might be controversial. A gay man is tortured after his lover is killed, starts experiencing stigmata, and then his lover returns as a demon for revenge against the "holy men" who are torturing his lover. Again, I really liked this one, and thought it was pretty brave to link its themes together.

L is for Legacy - One I didn't like here. I know all these shorts were low-budget, but the effects in this one really stood out. Plus I really couldn't work out what the hell was going on and why it related to the title word, 'Legacy'. Was the black demon there because of the failed sacrifice? Because someone lied? Because a rat died? What the hell is a 'prince venom'?

O is for Ochlocracy (Mob Rule) - Who said horror movies can't be educational? Another of my favourites, this one involving survivors of a zombie apocalypse being brought before a court of zombies to answer for their crimes. Makes sense when you think about it all.

P is for P-P-P-P-Scary - No. This was supposed to be an homage to black-and-white comedy, but the only two things that were in my head for the whole of the segment were, "Why does the dancing man look like Ray Wise?" and "Why do they have such big fake noses?" The latter question made me worry that the short was going somewhere awkward, but overall it wasn't funny or very scary (and really, you couldn't think of something else for the letter P?)

R is for Roulette - Now this is how black-and-white homages should be done. Three people in a cellar play Russian Roulette, which turns out to be the kinder option for whatever is massing upstairs. Another very good short.

S is for Split - Best short of the whole film. A man on the phone to his wife has to listen as an intruder breaks in and attacks her. Brutally horrifying, gripping and manages to have a good twist at the end.

T is for Torture Porn - Oh, I was torn on this one. Directed by the Soska Sisters! Turning the tables on mysogynists in modelling and film shoots in a unique way! But... it relied on a rape joke for the punchline, which made me sad. Thankfully the post-credits sequence redeemed it somewhat by turning it fully into absurdist satire.

W is for Wish - A brilliant premise - two young brothers wish themselves into the world of their favourite He-Man knock-off, only to discover it isn't as fun as they'd imagined. Very imaginative and with a touch of the Cthulhu Mythos in there if you squint... but it's marred by a pedophilia joke at the end.

So, this time 11 shorts really stood out to me, and of those there were only three that I really didn't like. The rest of the shorts were, for the most part, good as well, but as I said if I went over all 26 of them we'd be here forever. There's definitely a solid shift to more horror-comedy in this sequel as well, which works well with the material that makes it up. Overall, this is a good sign and a welcome improvement in a series that didn't impress me all that much with its first offering.

 

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The ABCs of Death (2012)

Movie Review - Savaged (2013)

Savaged doesn't give you very long to get comfortable before throwing you in at the deep end. Zoe is a 20something deaf-mute woman who is travelling through the American southwest in order to move in with her fiance. While going through a small New Mexico town, however, she comes across two Native American men who are being hunted for sport by a gang of racist rednecks (one of whom, their nominal leader, bears a slightly unsettling resemblance to Norman Reedus). When she tries to help the two victims she ends up in the killers' sights, and they kidnap, rape and torture her before stabbing her and leaving her for dead in the desert.

A local Apache shaman finds her clinging to life, however, and attempts to save her life. During the ritual he performs to return her soul to her body however, the soul of long-dead Apache chief Mangas Coloradas, who just so happened to have been betrayed and murdered by the very ancestor of the raping, murdering rednecks we met earlier, comes along as well and he takes over Zoe's body to get revenge on the men who brutalized them both.

Savaged has been described as a combination of I Spit on Your Grave and The Crow and really, that's not too bad a description. It's a rape-revenge movie with a supernatural element, and it pretty effectively succeeds at what it sets out to do. A good part of this is due to actress Amanda Adrienne's portrayal of Zoe; a beautiful, happy young woman whose only crimes were to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and trying to help somebody. Because of this she finds herself in a living hell twice over - first when she is tortured and raped by the rednecks, and then later when her body is used by Mangas Coloradas for revenge but continues to slowly rot as their shared need for vengance becomes the only thing keeping her/them going. She certainly doesn't look like she should be able to inflict the kind of damage she's doing to the redneck gang of murderers, being as delicate and willowy as she is, so it's almost as though she's performing a form of very deadly interpretive dance.

One scene in particular stands out to me - Zoe, possessed by Mangus but at that point in control of her body, finds an old radio in a barn and discovers that she can hear for the first time in her life. She listens happily to some classical piano playing for a few moments, before accidentally changing channel to so a war programme and jumping away from the noise in fear. It might not be the most subtle of metaphors, but it is effective.

On the other hand, the film does suffer from having its villains be... well, too villainous. When we meet them they're running down and murdering Native Americans for sport, and it just goes downhill from there. They're racists (from a long line of racists, no less); they're rapists; they're murderers... they're really more charicatures of villains, missing only some random animal cruelty or one of them stealing a balloon from a small child to complete the picture. Two of them do show some small glimmers of personality beyond "rape, kill, repeat" (one of them doesn't rape Zoe and attempts to give her a quick death when they decide to kill her, while their leader the Norman Reedus-alike almost seems to be regretting some of his actions by the film's end) but they're not actually developed in any way. They're really just made to be as reprehensible as possible so we can properly sit back and enjoy Zoe/Mangus getting their revenge on them.

Cardboard, "evil for evil's sake" antagonists aside though, Savaged is quite a good little indie film. It certainly brings a new twist to the rape-revenge subgenre (although I have to admit I'm not too fond of the subgenre in the first place) and some of its setpieces are pretty good for a low-budget film (a tomahawk vs bowie knife fight in the truck bed of a moving pickup truck, for example). Plus a chance to learn some genuine Apache history.

 

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Movie Review - I Saw The Devil (2010)

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Movie Review - I Saw The Devil (2010)

Kyung-chul is a serial killer who likes to rape and dismember his female victims. The police haven't been able to catch him, but when he makes the fiancee of a Secret Service agent his latest victim, he finds himself being chased down by a man withe the resources to track him and the furious vengeance to make him suffer. Kim Soo-hyeon, the agent who makes it his life's mission to chase down his fiancee's killer, meanwhile finds himself falling deeper and deeper into obsession and revenge, making increasingly more dubious moral choices as he continues his stalking of Kyung-chul and putting others in danger for the sake of his vendetta.

I'm not entirely sure what makes Korean cinema so good at doing vengeance movies, but whatever it is I hope they keep doing it. I Saw The Devil does the cinematic equivalent of grabbing you by the throat and not letting go for the entire film. We barely have time to get settled in the film and get to know the characters before the bloodshed starts, and once it does it doesn't stop for anything. Our two leads - serial killer Kyung-chul and agent Kim Soo-hyeon - are seemingly polar opposites of each other, and yet as the film progresses we realise that they are more alike than Soo-hyeon would maybe like to admit. Certainly a good portion of the plot could be summed up with the old Nietzsche quote: "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Cliched, maybe, but the film presents it in such a way that you don't really notice or care too much; you're too eager to see what these two men are going to do next in their psychotic game of chess.

If there is any flaw in this film, it's at about the halfway point, where Kyung-chul goes to hide out with an old friend while on the run from Soo-hyeon. This old friend and his girlfriend turn out to be serial killing cannibals as well, who prey on the rich by breaking into their homes to torture, kill and eat them, and while the scenes and events in the house themselves are good, it is just somewhat... implausible that there is almost an "Old Boys network" (an ironic pun I'll explain in the next paragraph)  of serial killers who help each other out when necessary. Then again, this is just a personal niggle of mine and it doesn't really detract from the film as a whole.

Kyung-chul is played by Min-sik Choi, who some people might recognise as Dae-su Oh from the 2003 film Oldboy (until looking up the cast and credits for I Saw The Devil, I hadn't, to my eternal shame). Unsurprisingly, Min-sik Choi turns in a spectacular performance of a man who truly cares about no-one but himself and his own urges, and he really is one of the things that makes this film as good as it is. His polar opposite, Kim Soo-hyeon, is played by Byung-hun Lee, and he is equally as good in his role. As I said, it is difficult to actually find many faults with the film at all, unless you include the recent news that there is an American remake in the works, which will likely go down about as well as the remake of Oldboy that came out last year...

 

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Movie Review - The House on the Edge of the Park (1980)

The House on the Edge of the Park (or The House of the Park on the Edge, if you take the mis-edited title from the trailer) was one of the films to fall afowl of the "video nasties" purge in the UK in the early 1980s, and was in fact banned until 2002, when it was finally released with nearly 12 minutes of cuts. In 2011 the BBFC waived most of those cuts (leaving only about 42 seconds of cuts to one particular scene), but it is of course my luck to get hold of the heavily-cut version for this review. Ah well. At least I know what's been cut out and how it relates to the plot.

The film starts with Alex, played by David Hess (hired for the movie on the strength of his performance in Last House on the Left; the filmmakers wanted him in the film so badly that they gave him half the rights to the film) running a car off the road and then raping and strangling its female driver. He takes her locket as a 'trophy' of the event. Some indeterminate time later Alex and his friend Ricky (who is described as somewhat mentally challenged) are preparing to shut up their garage and go out partying when a couple drive up in their expensive car and ask for help fixing it. Ricky managed to fix their problem easily and Alex then manages to get the two of them invited along to the party that the rich couple are going to.

At the "party" it quickly becomes clear to Alex that the rich people there are only out to have fun at the expense of their less-well-off party guests. Ricky is their target for the majority of this, as they persuade him to get drunk and do a striptease for them, then proceed to fleece him in a crooked poker game. Alex eventually puts a stop to this, after being teased to the point of blue balls by one of the women there, and he then proceeds to turn the tables on his rich "hosts" and their friends. The rest of the film is then the various ways Alex and Ricky (mostly Alex, really) abuse, torture and rape the guests, including the film's most infamous scene where Alex uses a straight razor to slice up a naked teenage girl who happened to turn up at the house at the wrong time (The BBFC of course removed nearly every moment of this scene, save for a few facial reaction shots of Alex and Cindy, his victim, leaving the average viewer completely in the dark as to what is going on. He could be tickling the soles of her feet to the point of pain for all we know).

It is easy to see how the film fell afoul of the video nasties panic; sexualised violence has always been a bannable theme for the BBFC, and the obvious pleasure that Alex gets from his straight razor assault on Cindy alone would probably have been enough on its own. Add in the several sexual assaults and rapes throughout the film, and the dubious reactions of at least one of the victims to it, and I guess you do have a problematic film. Of course, there's a reason for the latter which we discover at the end, but all that does is add weight to Alex's repeated assertions through the film that the "rich people" don't feel things like he and Ricky do; they don't value friendships or each other the same way. (Some people have read a homoerotic subtext into Alex and Ricky's relationship; I leave it up to the individual to make their own decision after seeing the film.) But certainly by the end of the film, no-one comes off as a particularly nice person - Alex is obviously the villain of the piece, but nearly everyone else is morally dubious as well, willing to let innocent people suffer for their own ends. It can certainly be a difficult film to watch, if nothing else.

 

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