You'll Float Too!

Before I get into my TIFF coverage, there is something else I must talk about. This weekend I saw the much anticipated release of Andy Muschetti's new version of Stephen King's It.

I came around to the idea of this adaptation after I saw the first trailer. I realized that there were a lot of things that could be improved upon from the 1990 mini-series so I gave it a chance. I'm very glad I did. Director Muschietti did an exemplary job. After his previous film Mama, we already knew he had a knack for set pieces and getting solid performances from young actors, but he took it to another level with It.

However, from day one, it was evident that this film would live or die on the portrayal of Pennywise the Dancing Clown and Bill Skarsgård really nailed it. He didn't try to ape Tim Curry's version, but rather used his own energy. I absolutely loved the physicality he brought to this role. He looked like he was literally drinking the fear coming off his victims.

Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise the clown in It.

Apart from Pennywise though, it was super impressive to me that Muschietti was able to assemble such a wonderful cast of eight young kids that could not only act, but also gel together as well as they did here. They were all great, especially Sophie Lillis & Jack Dylan Fraser who played Beverly & Eddie. Lillis gave a wonderfully layered performance and Fraser had this unique vibe that really made him stand out.

It's widely accepted that the downfall of Mama came from its over-reliance on CGI and Muschietti has mostly learned his lesson from that. While It did employ substantial visual effects, a lot of them were used in really creative ways. I feel like they utilized many different techniques, some of them so abstract my brain had trouble latching onto them - the lady in the painting and the headless figure in the library in particular were two real standouts for me.

The Loser's Club 2017

Looking back on It, I can recall so many solid set pieces. In the first half of the movie, the sheer volume of them was almost exhausting. Muschietti employed a modern jump scare formula, but he seems to have a better handle on it than most of his contemporaries. He knows when to pull back, before you fall over the precipice of desensitization. He also had the right amount of restraint on his eighties fan service. It was set then, but didn't overly ram the decade down our throats as much as Stranger Things tends to.

Another layer that I found really enticing – and this could very well be cribbed from the book – was the characterization of the town of Derry itself. I felt there was this underlying thread that the townspeople were complacent that this evil shit was just going to happen every quarter century and they just hoped it wasn't their kid that got snatched. It would explain why Eddie's mother tried to keep him sheltered from the outside world.

It was a top tier King adaptation with a measure of darkness very few have had. It always seemed to me that his vision has often obscured while on its way to the screen, either by the team at the helm or, in the case of almost all of his small screen ventures, restrained from its full potential. It felt much more like the adaptation glory years from 1976 to 1984.

I think It will take a lot of people by surprise. The previous teleplay had a very playful predilection to it that this one does not. Sure, there's the jovial shit-talking among The Loser's Club, but once It appeared well... It's like I exclaimed after the opening SS Georgie scene – “These guys aren't fucking around.”

It's TIFF Time Again!

The craziness that is September in Toronto begins again this evening and I will be ingesting my usual ten or so films over the next ten days. Here are just five for which I am looking forward.

I dug the book and David Bruckner is a solid director, so excited to see how this translates.

Two of my most treasured TIFF experiences were the premieres of The Devil's Backbone & Pan's Labyrinth, so I expect more of the same from Guillermo del Toro. Plus, I've been told that the very theater in which I will be watching the film actually appears in it. How surreal!

Surely a selection for the Vanguard program if it still existed, this is a complete question mark to me. However, I trust programmer Peter Kuplowsky's tastes and it's nice to have some Canadian content representing midnight once again.

Combine the pedigree behind one of my all-time favourite TIFF films, The Orphanage with Anya Taylor-Joy and you have my attention.

 

The new film from Paco Plaza, one half of the team that brought us the [REC] series. That's really all I need to know. Plus, I love the brilliant simplicity of the poster.

Things will be silent here for a few days, but there is a ton of stuff going on in the next week-and-a-half so you'll be hearing about it soon enough.

The Art of the Dreamer.

The eighteen-episode opus of David Lynch & Mark Frost's Twin Peaks: The Return concluded last weekend. The final moments were divisive to say the least, but I guess we should have expected as much. When has anything that Lynch has touched ever been straightforward, right?

My initial reaction was one of confusion and a hope that this latest thread would be continued in an as-yet unannounced fourth season. Truth be told, the eighteenth stanza of The Return felt more like the premiere of said season, as the previous episode had had more finality to it. However, upon reflection and the further away I get from the finale, the less I feel I need another season. I would love one, but I don't need it. Now being okay with the ending, I think my only disappointment lay with the hanging thread of the Shelly/Red storyline. Although saying that, all roads likely led to pain and sorrow so I'm probably better off. Plus, no confirmation of who ate that bug thing in Episode eight. I'll go with Sarah Palmer, sure that's the ticket...

Despite the bewildering effect of the show's final moments, it all makes some kind of sense considering the magicians behind the curtain. The end felt like a nightmare, very much the kind of thing you would see right before you wake in a cold sweat. As with Fire Walk With Me, Lynch & Frost have left us with fragments, again very much like waking from a dream. We have what we need and there are already several interpretations from viewers that fall in line with Lynch's Dreamer Trilogy (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive & Inland Empire). That's Lynch's M.O. (“Modus Operandi!”)

But the Return was not about its ending, it was about the journey viewers had been on for the last three-and-a-half months. This latest string of episodes have produced so many memorable moments, both joyous and vile, and its residue will not leave me for quite some time. Twin Peaks continues to possess an ethereal quality that, like the properties of the Lodge, seem to be able to dissolve time. Some episodes felt so short that I found myself saying “already?” when the end credits appeared and others were the exact opposite. I actually initially thought that the show ended at the end of episode seventeen because my brain thought they must have played the last two together without a break.

The Twin Peaks experience also included the act of consuming it. My good friend Serena hosted weekly watch parties with donuts, cherry pie and themed cocktails. It was a ritual that brought back the practice of pre-Netflix television. Truth be told, I feel my brain needed those weekly breaks between episodes to digest and theorize just what the hell was going on. It definitely added to it. I wager that binge watching The Return will be a very different experience.

My favourite concoction, The Charcoal Woodsman.

Twin Peaks: The Return was beautiful avant-garde television, the likes of which the medium has never seen and perhaps never will again. Thank you to Lynch & Frost for bringing us along on their vision quest. Thank you to Showtime for their faith in non-conventional storytelling. And thank you to every other cog in this wonderfully confounding wheel.

Trailer Tuesdays: Cassandra

I had intended to do a VHS Friday for Colin Eggleston's 1987 Aussie horror Cassandra, but it wasn't that hot so I'll just throw up the trailer for you. No harm, no foul.

A Tale of Three Siblings.

The Canadian indie thriller Blood Honey hit theatres last week. You may have heard about the accompanying world record attempt in downtown Toronto. Anyway I gave it a whirl.

After returning home to a remote Ontario village to see her ailing father, Jenibel (Shenae Grimes-Beech) begins to feel threatened after she received the largest stake holder of his land and on-site apiary business. 

Despite its title, there is nothing particularly sweet about this movie. I have to admit, for a Canadian indie, it was one of the best looking I've seen though, as the location (the Northern Ontario town of Britt) was pristine and the perfect locale for a movie like this. I was with it for a while, but when the story ultimately presented where it was going, I was left underwhelmed despite some veteran Canadian players like Don McKellar and Natalie Brown.

Blood Honey felt like a family drama with genre elements shoehorned into it. I have to wonder if someone just didn't take someone's straightforward script and then bring in a third party to make it more Blumhouse-y. The whole bee element was completely superficial and if removed wouldn't have really affected the movie at all, other than they wouldn't have been able to justify all the honey in that bizarrely placed sex scene.

Shanae Grimes-Beech as Jenibel in Blood Honey

That said, I don't know if the publicity stunt with the bees really helped the movie at all. I guess it got the word out sure - and admittedly a character does die in a similar fashion in the movie – but the whole thing makes the movie seem a whole lot more sensationalist than it actually is. And from my experience, when an audience goes in expecting something and they don't get it, things often don't go well.

The core of Blood Honey is family, but when it showed its DNA, I realized I'd already seen this done much better. Hell, it had even been remade once and nobody asked for it then either. I'm a little saddened by this movie because in some ways it was a step forward in terms of Canadian indie filmmaking, but its disingenuous marketing and construct represent more of a step backward in terms of legitimizing the medium.

DKTM 352

Hello all. I hope you are enjoying your Labour Day weekend. I am basically just killing time before the two-hour finale of Twin Peaks tonight, but in the meantime here are some damn good bits of genre to chew on.

Better Watch Out!

I wanted to call attention to an awesome publication that is currently taking pre-orders on IndieGogo, Spectacular Optical's Yuletide Terror. I'll let the pitch video take the floor.

Edited by Kier-La Janisse & Paul Corupe, they have been putting out quality books on film for years, including 2014's Kid Power and 2015's Satanic Panic. I am super stoked for this one, as it will have articles on some of my favourite Xmas titles, including Black Christmas & 3615: Code Pere Noël aka Game Over.

I immediately pledged when I found out that there was a perk available commemorating Ed Hunt's 1988's Christmas classic The Brain.

For more info on the campaign, click here.

Rue Morgue Turns 20.

Congratulations to Rue Morgue magazine to hitting twenty years, as their new Halloween issue hit stands recently.

It's a pretty ballin' issue with extensive articles on the history of witches on film and media as well as the terrific piece (which I also contributed to) 25 Non-Fiction Genre Film Books That Everyone Should Own. To commemorate the 20th anniversary, music editor Aaron Von Lupton compiled this sweet horror-synth playlist entitled They Came From Rue Morgue.

Here's to twenty more, Rue Morgue!

Bustin' Cape Town Style!

Check out this awesome proof-of-concept video for Michael Matthew's adaptation of the Charlie Human novel.

The comparisons to Ghostbusters and District 9 are obviously apt, but I actually got a big John Dies At The End vibe, as well. Hopefully, something larger comes from this.

Barker Bits.

In addendum to my piece on HexFest's Rawhead Rex last weekend, there was also some coverage done by the Clive Barker Podcast via correspondent Jonathan Kui. Check it out below if you wanna hear interviews with yours truly, HXFF director Aaron Allen and the full talk with Greg Lamberson that followed the movie.

All Fired Up.

With the passing of Tobe Hooper last week, it seemed fitting to showcase one of his lesser known titles, the 1990 Brad Dourif vehicle, Spontaneous Combustion. And it just so happens that I picked up the VHS at this year's Shock Stock so I was all ready to go.

The child of parents who underwent nuclear experimentation thirty years earlier, Sam (Dourif) begins to experience some fantastical side effects.

Man, this one is a strange beast. The transition from the eighties to nineties brought about a shift in horror from the outward monsters and the supernatural to the inward and the more psychological oeuvre spearheaded by Adrien Lyne's Jacob's Ladder in 1990. Hooper's Spontaneous Combustion almost seems to want to inhabit both spaces. On the back of some nuclear hysteria, the first act portrays a very human story. Then Brad Dourif starts shooting fire out of his arm!

Hooper had a solid track record of mixing horror and sci-fi elements – Invaders From Mars and Lifeforce being the two most obvious – and it continued here. I feel like he was always contemplating how to best meter out the humour in his films. He often talked about how the humour in Texas Chainsaw was so black it took several years for most audiences to realize it was even there. That was why he ratcheted it up to eleven in the sequel.

In Spontaneous Combustion, I feel again Hooper did not want to choose. The things that were happening onscreen were so bat-shit bonkers, yet everyone involved was playing it straight. Dourif was the only one who seemed to be increasingly distressed at his predicament. And I must ask, has there ever been a better angry screamer in cinematic history? This was just one of several really meaty roles he'd have that year (Exorcist III & Hidden Agenda were two other standouts) and he gave one-hundred-and-ten-per cent. It felt like the wheels were going to come off the cart at several points during this movie and he just soldiered on.

This movie's many flourishes were not lost on me. John Landis' cameo was good for a laugh and holy Lisa's (Cynthia Bain) neon phone made me very envious. You know, it also struck me that considering how many doctors were in this movie it was amazing that none of them seem to know how to give an injection. And while the pyrotechnics may not have been as dazzling as say the ones in Firestarter, I thought they did some ridiculously awesome things with them.

You're doing it wrong!

So while Spontaneous Combustion may not stand up against Hooper's best works, like the Chainsaws and Salem's Lot or have as much personality as some of his others like The Mangler and Lifeforce, it was still a hoot and an opportunity to see Dourif front and center for a change.