American Mary @ Mayhem Festival

Mary Mason is strapped for cash. She studies hard to be a surgeon at university and lives on her own in a small apartment where at night she operates on cold turkeys, but Student Loans keep calling her demanding she pay the fees. So one evening she answers a job ad at a nearby Gentleman’s club, where the owner, Billy, asks her to strip to her underwear and to give him a massage. Mid-massage Billy gets a call saying that one of his ‘gang’ is dying in the basement from a fatal wound to the chest and he desperately offers Mary $5,000 to save his life. Mary accepts, completes the operation successfully and returns home with the money. Later that week however, a woman who looks uncannily like Betty Boop turns up at her apartment asking for Mary to perform surgery on her friend. Her friend, it turns out, wants to be ‘de-sexualised’ (you can imagine what that entails) in exchange for $10,000. Again, Mary accepts and she is subsequently drawn into the underground, and very illegal, world of body modification.

 Definitely one of the more original films of the festival, American Mary is obviously a very well thought through, very well made piece of cinema, the kind that we don’t really seem to get anymore, what with all the teen-orientated horror about possession and found-footage that’s shown all year round. It’s certainly a very refreshing film to watch. Its themes echo strongly that of David Cronenberg’s body-horror era, especially Scanners, The Brood or even Videodrome, and more recently films like Human Centipede and Audition. Then obviously there’s the iconic Dr Frankenstein or Dr Jekyll; the idea of altering the human body, changing its basic composition, which holds a strong resonance in American Mary as we see her in the operating theatre slicing and grafting bits of her patients’ skin.

 More importantly though, it’s also a film directed by women (the Soska sisters, whose debut Dead Hooker in a Trunk has been a favourite amongst grindhouse fans) specifically about women. The character of Mary has no male friends; in fact some of the only men with whom she comes into contact are either perverts or misogynists, and theme of revenge is strong throughout, inspiring scenes similar to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It may seem like a complicated idea, but for the most part, it works – for while the plot might be confused at times, it’s the well-written characters and their actors that drive the film forward. Katherine Isabelle, who plays Mary, is close to perfection in her role, creating a blend of Zooey Deschanel and Wednesday Addams: a light-hearted performance, yet with a grounded, macabre centre that can be quite menacing at times. The Soska sisters even make an appearance as identical twins, ‘Queens of the body-mod world’, with filed teeth, sinister German accents and corset piercings down their back. The whole film plays like a Marilyn Manson music video.

Not a film for the squeamish, though definitely one for fans of any type of horror – it’s strangely fascinating, yet never unbelievable.

The Casebook of Eddie Brewer @ Mayhem Festival

Mr Eddie Brewer is a psychic investigator, a man whose job it is to investigate ghostly occurrences, and he has agreed to take part in a documentary for the Culture channel. A presenter and cameraman follow Eddie around on the job, occasionally interviewing those involved and attempting to capture actual footage of the paranormal. Their first stop is a small, suburban house where a mother and daughter claim to have been having trouble with a poltergeist. Eddie sets up a camcorder in the lounge and then he and the film crew travel to their next appointment: Rookery House, a broken-down Georgian building where strange noises have been heard coming from the basement. 

 The film, written and directed by the relatively new filmmaker Andrew Spencer, is shot primarily as a documentary, but interspersed with CCTV tapes of the office block and several objective fourth wall scenes, creating an intriguing cinematic collage of different mediums. ‘This is not a found footage film’, Andrew assured the audience firmly at the Q & A session afterwards, and it is really isn’t. Cleverly, the CCTV shows the audience a few scenes that neither Eddie nor the documentary team are aware of, adding an extra layer to the film’s well-crafted narrative. 

In terms of scares (this is a horror festival, remember?), The Casebook of Eddie Brewer doesn’t really go in for shocks – this is no Paranormal Activity. There are no slamming doors, and only a few ghostly figures are glimpsed throughout – it’s more the atmosphere that’s unnerving. The walks through the empty, echoing basement and the mysterious hole in the wall make the film a very uncomfortable watch; the audience is always expecting something shocking to happen when the lights turn off, or as the camera edges around a particularly dark corner (especially considering the film’s 18 rating), but nothing ever does, and that’s the problem. It’s very reminiscent of films like Blair Witch Project (yes, a predictable example), especially those scenes in the basement, and while Blair Witch might be a different kind of film, it’s certainly a better horror film.

 Eddie Brewer, however, as a character is fantastic. Plagued by unexplained guilt (his wife, it is revealed early on in the film, died in a fire earlier that year) and constantly having to defend his profession and his dated techniques, the film offers a very complex character study, one that actor Ian Brooker has obviously worked hard to portray. Eddie is simply a very likeable man, one that the audience sticks with throughout, even in his angry or sulking moods. And while Eddie, rather ‘old school’ in his methods, is stubbornly averse to being called a ‘medium’, and even stresses repeatedly how he doesn’t charge for his services, it’s interesting to note that when a paid medium is actually brought into the building, the film starts to become a lot more exciting. Odd things start to happen; things that may have been staged by the medium himself, but work nonetheless, adding to the film’s carefully constructed atmosphere and were very well executed.  

The Casebook of Eddie Brewer is a good, strong character study, and a subtle satire on TV shows like Most Haunted, yet it still leaves you feeling somewhat unsatisfied.

Link to my original article: http://www.impactnottingham.com/2012/11/review-the-casebook-of-eddie-brewer-mayhem-horror-film-festival-2012/

The Beyond @ Screen 22

Lucio Fulci’s films are the ones to watch if you’re in the mood for disgusting, overtly camp horror. He started his career in a rather harmless way, directing a dozen or more unsuccessful Italian comedies that didn’t get a very wide release, particularly in the US. Then in the early 70s, possibly due to the suicide of his wife, he joined the ranks of the infamous ‘giallo’ directors, which included Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava and Sergio Martino and began creating some of his most famous films to date. Zombie Flesh Eaters and City of the Living Dead followed, obvious yet brilliant attempts to cash in on Romero’s undead franchise.

 Then came The Beyond: a delightful tale of Lovecraftian horror that had to be heavily edited and released using an alternate title for it actually to be shown in American cinemas, and Kino Klubb (following the success of their screening of Carpenter’s They Live! at Broadway last month) were kind enough to show it a week before Halloween, uncut and uncensored at Screen 22.

  For those of you unaware of what Screen 22 is, it is unofficially the smallest cinema in Europe (with only one screen and 22 seats, but Guinness World Records have yet to confirm it), just off Broad Street in Nottingham, and they don’t show newly released films, but a careful selection of classics, voted for by the public. Before The Beyond was shown, a nice man from Kino Klubb wearing a glow-in-the-dark skeleton outfit introduced filmmaker Luther Bhogal Jones, who, after expressing his admiration for Fulci, showed his brilliant new short film Creak, inspired by bumps in the night and exploring houses in the dark. 

 Then came the horror, the brightly coloured horror, of The Beyond, and everyone settled down in their seats, chocolate eyeballs clutched in their hands, ready to be entertained. The plot: in the late 1920s an artist is lynched in the basement of a hotel for dabbling in the black arts, and his murder opens up one of the Seven Gates to Hell. Cut to the present day and Lisa, a young woman from New York, has inherited the hotel and plans to have it renovated, but the building-work re-activates the portal and a whole host of things start to go wrong: people fall off ladders, patients at a nearby hospital all turn into zombies and the ghost of a blind girl tries to get Lisa to move out of the hotel. How does she get things back to normal?

 The Beyond is basically two different films sewn together: the first half, a haunted house story, comprising of a series of random ghostly events (the director himself said the film was plotless), and then the second, a full-blown zombie thriller set in a hospital, as if Fulci wanted to incorporate elements of Zombie Flesh Eaters. It just seemed overcomplicated – perhaps if the zombies were in the hotel itself, it would have been a more grounded and enjoyable film, but setting it in two completely separate locations muddled the already weightless story. 

  The special effects used were admittedly very entertaining, and the audience groaned or laughed every time an eyeball exploded  (Fulci’s trademark obsessions with eyes and the act of seeing are present throughout his films) or a tarantula ripped open someone’s face – this was some of the most inventive gore of its time, challenging and inspiring the likes of The Evil Dead, The Thing and Alien to be artfully disgusting without the use of computer graphics. This, and the hilarious lines of dialogue (“No Lisa, I’m a doctor! I’m calling the FBI.”), make it easy to see why The Beyond is considered by many to be such a cult classic. 

An equally pleasant and horrifying evening – Kino Klubb definitely know how to host a horror film.

 

 

Maniac @ Mayhem Festival

Maniac is the perfect film with which to start the festival. Premiering at Cannes this summer, the film is a masterful blend of innovative camerawork and claustrophobic horror that leaves the 1980s original lying hopelessly in the dust.

  Elijah Wood plays Frank, a man who stalks the streets at night looking for beautiful women. On finding a suitable match, he follows them home and then proceeds to kill and scalp them, taking the bloody mess of hair back to his shop where it is stapled onto the head of one of his many mannequins. Frank becomes disorientated, however, when he meets French photographer Anna, a friendly and attractive girl who wants to take pictures of his shop mannequins for an art exhibition. He cares for her, in a way that he hasn’t done with any girl before, and is mortified to discover that she has a boyfriend. On top of that, his murders are all over the news…

 Filmed almost completely in POV, we see what Frank sees; we see who he kills and how he does it – the only times we get a look at his face is when it’s reflected in mirrors or glass. It’s a very clever technique that director Franck Khalfoun has decided to use, simply because of how uncomfortable the audience is made to feel - there are scenes where Frank enters the apartments of women who are showering or taking a bath that are actually painful to watch. Similarly, the killings themselves, while not particularly violent, seem so real that they become difficult to comprehend. 

Inspiration is obvious. Elements of Psycho are scattered throughout the narrative, so much so that by the end it makes sense to look at Frank as a modern extension of Norman Bates; it becomes explicitly clear that his relationship with his dead mother plays an important part in how he views other women. Interestingly enough, Maniac is in no way misogynistic; Frank isn’t seeking revenge over how women have treated him and his motives have nothing directly to do with sex - he seems simply to be a collector of beauty.

 Another film that Maniac echoes strongly is Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but in a different kind of way. Henry, like Frank, drives around the dark streets of the city killing unsuspecting women, but it’s very much an objective portrayal – very cold and unsympathetic, whereas Maniac’s narrative is the most empathising a film can be without reading a character’s thoughts aloud and this is where its strengths mainly lie. Wood gives an amazingly believable performance, playing Frank with an unexpected mixture of depravity and humanity, to such an extent that the audience is actually able to feel sympathetic towards him as his world slowly disintegrates.

 In terms of horror, Maniac is up there with some of the best of the year, not just because of the acting and the special effects, but also because of its subject matter. For once, this is a film that doesn’t deal with exorcism, possession or found footage – it explores the mind of a serial killer on a profoundly creative level, one that makes you think and shudder at exactly the same time.

‘Please don’t scream. You’re so beautiful’.