T is for Terrified (2017)

For this one I decided to check the only title on Shudder's 101 Scariest Movie Moments Of All Time that I hadn't seen. As luck would have it, it starts with the letter T.

Two professors and a cop investigate strange occurrences in a Buenos Aries neighbourhood.

As I was expecting, this one was quite a banger. Taken at face value, it would be indistinguishable from the mainstream Hollywood dreck in this vein - it's probably why I didn't watch it until now - and that's a shame because Demián Rugna has the chops to make this type of material sing.

Terrified is not only a matter of quality, but quantity. With a movie like this, you are happy if you get one or two really good set pieces or striking visuals, but this movie has a bag full of tricks. There's not only that terrific example of restraint in that scene at the kitchen table that they talk about in the 101, but a few other really clever scares that beautifully use misdirection. I did jump more than once.

This movie utilizes a narrative of inescapable dread much like Ju-on: The Grudge. It is not just haunting a person or a house, but everyone it comes in contact with. Additionally, we never truly understand the origin or motivation of the presence and that makes it all the more nihilistic.

Terrified is every bit as spooky and assured as its North American counterparts and currently available on Shudder so don't sleep on it!  

L is for The Last Matinee (2020)

When I was at Fantasia this summer, this movie was a blind buy at one of the pop-up Blu-ray vendors. It has sat in “the pile” until I realized it was alphabetically fortuitous to watch it now.

Unsuspecting moviegoers at a cinema in Montevideo are stalked by a sadistic killer.

This is a well made movie. It has good composition, a good location, a good lead actress (Luciana Grasso), good kills and a good score. All the side stories are amusing, the kid who sneaks in, the loud teenagers, the first date couple... However, there just seems to be something missing for it to add up to the sum of its parts.

Perhaps The Last Matinee is just trying too hard to stand alongside its influences. It doesn't take long to see that director Maximiliano Contenti is a huge giallo fan, as well as Bigas Luna's 1987 flick Anguish. You take Zelda Rubinstein out of that movie and The Last Matinee is basically a remake. There's even an Anguish poster in the box office. 

Luciana Grasso as Ana in The Last Matinee

Maybe it's the little distractions that add up - the Uruguayan Jonah Hill, the fact the movie is called The Last Matinee, but it's clearly night out or maybe just that I kept remembering that little kid was sitting in his own piss for half the movie.

At first I thought the film playing in the theatre while all this was going on - Frankenstein: Day of the Beast - was shot alongside this movie. That would have been impressive, but when I looked it up I found it was a ten-year-old movie made by Ricardo Islas who plays the TLM's killer. Less impressive, but it is cool that they include the full movie on the disc as a special feature.

The Last Matinee was serviceable and slick, like most horrors are these days. Easily digestible, but not filling.

Fantasia 2018: Part One

All told I saw fifteen films this year at Fantasia, ranging from retro martial arts to Kiwi comedy to upcoming horrors. Here were some of the highlights in case you are keeping score at home.

Probably my fave of the trip was Justin P. Lange's The Dark. I heard comparisons to Let The Right One In prior to the screening and they are apt. However, I'd say the dynamic between the two leads (Nadia Alexander & Toby Nichols) was a little different, as were the events that got them there. This equally sweet and sanguine effort was right up my alley.

Lee Chang-hee's The Vanished was a terrific thriller from South Korea. It walks a fine line between conventional and supernatural with a narrative that unfolds flawlessly, yet still has room for levity courtesy of a Columbo-esque gumshoe played by Kim Kang-woo. Just when I thought the movie might be spinning its wheels in the third act, it hit me with a fantastic conclusion that tied everything together.

Brazillian director Dennison Ramalho has wowed me over the years with his short films Love For Mother Only, Ninjas & ABC 2's J is for Jesus, but The Nightshifter was his first foray into long form. Wonderfully obtuse to start, the film actually became increasingly more conventional as it progressed. It wouldn't surprise me if an American studio remade this by the end of the decade.

On the science-fiction side of things was Isaac Ezban's Parallel. This was some smart and engaging stuff that was heavily aided by the visual stylings of cinematographer Karim Hussein. I really loved that the filmmakers took the fascinating theory of the Mandela Effect and fashioned it into a feature long concept.

Filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov was back at Fantasia this year with three films, but the one I caught was Profile. Using the same “screen reality” format employed in his Unfriended series, this one featured far more serious subject matter. This film was as tense as it was topical. I really dig this evolution of found footage and its fresh way of telling stories. Considering how much time we spend in front of our computer screens these days, I feel there is real strength in the familiarity of its narratives. 

Lastly, I wanted to give a shout-out to a pair of comrades who had their films play at Fantasia. My Little Terrors cohort Justin McConnell premiered his new feature Lifechanger and Jen Wexler screened her backwoods slasher The Ranger.

It was a terrific week in terms of film, as well as festival events, but more on those tomorrow.

DKTM 311

Hey all. This edition of Don't Kill the Messenger is going to be decidedly retro. Here's what I've got for you this week.

Slashermania!

A while back, I spoke of an indie comics project from the UK called Slashermania. The brainchild of Russell Hillman, he seeks to combine the best elements of Friday the 13th and The Running Man into one big, well, Slashermania.

The Kickstarter campaign has just begun, so check out the pitch trailer below.

If this seems like your bag, check out the campaign page by going here.

Viva Giallo!

Last year at Sitges saw the premiere of Luciano Onetti's modern giallo, Francesca. Now, it is set to be released on home video by Unearthed Films on September 27th. Check out the Blu-ray artwork and trailer below.

Survive!

Here is the new poster for Rob Zombie's newest flick 31. 

As we all know, Zombie is pretty hit and miss, but I'm still interested in checking this one out, even if it does look more like 1000 Corpses than Devil's Rejects. 31 is set to be released on October 21st.

The Squad on Blu-ray

Before I get to some of the great titles I saw at this banner year at Toronto After Dark, I have another guest post from Canuxploitation's Paul Corupe. This time, he has the rundown on the new Scream Factory Blu-ray release of the South American horror flick The Squad. Take it away, Paul.

Fall in maggots! Time to enlist in The Squad, a respectable 2011 Colombian horror-thriller that seems to have received most of its marching orders from John Carpenter's The Thing. Though The Squad fails to reach those lofty heights, the film is well-shot and occasionally atmospheric as it weaves some similar paranoia-based siege thrills. Though Scream! Factory usually opts for vintage horror, The Squad still feels akin to many of their other releases—a low-budget paranormal outing set in the middle of a civil war that manages some impressively tense scenes despite difficulty in getting them to pay off properly.

In the film, a crack military squad led by Sanchez (Mauricio Navas) reclaims a base only to find it eerily deserted, with only blood-stained walls, vague warnings written in chalk and a logbook with increasingly curious entries. Hearing muffled noises, one of the soldiers knocks down a thin cement wall and, behind it, discovers a woman tied up, seemingly left for dead. The rest of the unit debates about whether to free her—is she a spy, innocent civilian or something else entirely? One notes that she must have been tied up for a reason, and his insight proves to be prophetic. When they do free her things start to get even stranger, as madness and suspicion threaten to rip the squad apart, sometimes literally.

An interesting, but uneven effort that made the Festival rounds in 2011, The Squad is intended as an allegory to its war-torn country of origin, currently host to the longest-running civil war in history that began all the way back in 1964. The film plays off local fears and paranoia about sudden violence, missing family members and citizens caught in the middle of warring factions in this seemingly unending conflict. The Squad taps into this nerve-wracking situation where a long forgotten land mine can change anyone's life in a split second, and highlights the utter weariness of the shell-shocked soldiers, damaged from their long tour of duty, as they have trouble distinguishing reality from fearful fantasy.

Not surprisingly, the film focuses on the soldiers themselves, these war-ravaged young men who are unsure of the nature of the curse that seems to have befallen them. The film trades in stereotypes--gung ho heroes and reluctant fighters—but there are some decent dramatic moments that develop as the squad tries to figure out what happened to the previous unit and whether recent history is repeating itself.

Director Jamie Osorio Marquez makes excellent use of his claustrophobic bunker setting, with pleasantly washed-out colour palettes that give the film a notable visual richness. Though the film manages some genuine frissons as the squad explores the fog-plagued bunker, fearful of enemy ambush, it noticeably has more trouble when Marquez had to sneak in actual scares. He seems unsure of how to lead the audience's eye and where exactly a frightful image should pop up onscreen. A scene of a leg amputation, while somewhat gory, doesn't have as much impact as it should, due to camera placement choices and unsuccessfully trying to get the point across by squishy sound effects instead.

The ambiguity of the terror plaguing the squad is also not handled terribly well--if anything, it's a little too on-the-nose while setting up its red herrings. The film's invented haziness about who the woman is and what she's doing comes off as too calculated and obvious, with many warnings about witches and eerie forces that tip the film’s hand pretty early on.

A film that looks this nice should have an eye-popping transfer, and the film’s new Blu-ray shows off the occasionally gorgeous cinematography of hazy mountain backgrounds. The creepy, active soundtrack also gets a nice boost from a lively DTS track. The presentation is top-notch, as we've come to expect from Scream! Factory. However, the only real extra is a 20-minute "making of" doc that has some interesting behind-the-scenes footage, but was seemingly created as a series of promotional pieces.

While far from a classic, fans of siege horror will surely have a good time with The Squad–especially those partial to more recent horror festival favourites. So move out and pickup this one up, soldier!