Streaming on SBS On-Demand (+ Stan, Amazon Prime and others)- Barrie Pattison re-acquaints himself with David Cronenberg CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (Canada/France/UK/Greece, 2022)

SBS doing a double of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future and Spider has directed my attention to him one more time.

I can’t help remembering how much more satisfying it was to hunt down his entry level trash horror movies in Drive-Ins and Fantasy Festivals - Rabid, Shivers & The Brood. That was before his re-make of The Fly became the first big exclamation point in shocker film after the Seigel Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Cronenberg was more fun, cheap and nasty than as a bridge between exploitation and art film.

He seems to like the “Crimes of the Future” title, having used it on one of his plotless early black & white silent underground movies. Here he’s given it significance deploying black actor Welket Bungué as a policeman tasked with such matters in a vaguely futurist era where pain has all but disappeared and Accelerated Evolution Syndrome is all the go.

Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux

We kick off with the idyllic scene of mother Lihi Kornowski calling her pre-teener playing on the beach, shortly before he starts eating the waste bin and she smothers him. One of the things the new film has going for it is that all this graphic material connects up by the time we get to the end.

Next up we get to Viggo Mortenson as a performance artist whose act is generating organs which his ex, trauma surgeon Léa Seydoux, (getting to be our current favourite naked French lady – a wide range of choice) removes for an audience of cocktail sipping socialites. Surgery is sexy we learn. This brings him to the National Organ Registry, whose director Don McKellar's assistant is mousey Kristin Stewart, who gets a scene pursuing off-put Viggo round the office – the least convincing thing in the film. She seems to have been recruited to add a celebrity name to the credits.

It all turns out to be part of a vast evolutionary conspiracy. The plot – if you can figure it out – is of course less significant than the constituent elements, many of which we’ve encountered in the director’s previous movies – Jeff Goldblum’s external digestions from The Fly, the road accidents of Crash or the graphic surgeries from the particularly yukky Dead Ringers. All of this takes place in bleak, striking locations – beached ships, deserted streets and run down industrial sites relatable to the Greek funding sources. Throw in the sinister sculpture “digestion chair”, Mortenson’s womb-like bed or the sarcophagus operating table. Did I mention execution by twin electric drills in the cranium after the illicit autopsy that Scott Speedman has been promoting?

There’s no doubt about the proficiency of the makers. Douglas Koch’s camerawork and Carol Spier‘s design hold attention. Howard Shore’s music cues us in on the required response. The superior cast bring a straight faced gravitas, which gives events a necessary conviction.

Question remains is all this A-list talent actually doing anything we should worry about.  Tell you the truth, I can’t decide. The schlock films, of which Crimes of The Future certainly is not, were fun,. The Fly and Existenz convinced as having substance. I didn’t like this one enough to want to probe it for that.

On 4K Ultra HD - David Hare is not taken with THE WICKER MAN (Robin Hardy, UK, 1973)

 For reasons that now completely escape me I stupidly bought the new StudioCanal UHD disc of that much touted Brit “cult film' The Wicker Man.

Maybe it’s my current nausea at horrible world events but I have not had a more vacant viewing of something so bad it actually confounded any understanding of why in God’s name (as it were) it was ever made.

For starters the director, Robin Hardy, is a figure whose movie career never took off. After watching this I know why. Lifeless, pointless arranging of poorly lit and ineptly staged shots with not one sequence displaying any dynamic or visual meaning. Direction of actors that through sheer incompetence reduces stalwarts like Edward Woodward and Britt Ekland to distilled parodies of themselves through multiple layers of strained infantile narcissism. 

If you think Woodward’s screwed up face, so tight to express his clenched sphincter so it looks like he hasn’t been able to shit for a month, is great acting, this is your picture.

Even the far too infrequent tits and ass moments are derisorily short. Boobies shake until they’re suddenly overwhelmed by the hideous tat decor that looks like it came out of the crummy antique shop David Hemmings stops to visit in Blow Up.  

But if the general hetero campery of a bunch of faux Gauls/Druids singing and dancing in costume party drag lights your joint, this is probably for you.

The Current Cinema - TALK TO ME (Danny & Michael Philippou, Australia, 2023) gets some attention

Mia (Sophie Wilde), Talk to Me

I used to say that the Australian cinema lacked an instinct for the popular. By which I meant  that the bread and butter of so many nation’s cinemas - crime and other genre stories, adaptations of popular novels, the use of pop short stories of the kind that used to appear in journals like the Saturday Evening Post or in pulp fiction – rarely attracted our film-makers. (Godard once stole a Donald Westlake novel and Truffaut adapted David Goodis and William Irish among others, just saying.)

That no longer applies. We do have crime stories and Indigenous film-maker Ivan Sen, especially with his Jay Swan movies and TV series and now his superb Limbo, has made genre film-making his own. Now, a lot of entry-level film-makers gravitate towards horror, one of the staples of film industries passim. That’s not something I’ve tried to keep up with, not something that the film festivals keep up with and now that the AFI’s annual screenings of anything that pays the entry fee seem to belong to the past, it’s doubtful if many people at all keep up with this mostly near-subterranean activity. 

 

"violent self-destructive tendencies when delved into by kids"

People do know, if you want to go back a bit, Wolf Creek (2005) and they do know The Babadook (2014). But for instance, who knows about or saw Wyrmwood (Kiah Roache-Turner, 2014) or its sequel Wyrmwood Apocalypse (Kiah Roache-Turner, 2021). Just the people who stock JB Hi-Fi’s shelves for the most part. Tribeca last month screened You'll Never Find Me (Indianna Bell & Josiah Allen). I guess there are some like Bloodshot Heart (Parish Maltifano) screened in the Fantastic Film Festival, but its website is currently giving no info. The recent Sydney Film Festival screened  Late Night with the Devil (Colin Cairnes & Cameron Cairnes) a co-production between Australia and the United Arab Emirates, in Richard Kuipers  Freak me Out section. There are heaps more and you see my limited acquaintance with them. I assume somebody is keeping a record somewhere, even if it’s just for tax purposes. 

 

Which in a haphazard way brings me to Talk to Me a film whose genre origins remain almost totally unknown to me though I could hazard a guess and say that the twins who made it, Danny and Michael Philippou have seen The Exorcist and The Shining more than once. No such claim is made in the Press Kit just a sentence from the Directors’ Statement: “We’re very inspired by smart psychological horror films in recent years that reflect current society but with a classic lens. These movies are not just entertaining but evolve the form by respecting the audience’s intelligence.”

Shake hands with the Devil

 

Such respect might be why this film amongst all the other unknowns got part-funded and screened by the Adelaide Film Festival. The main funding seems to have been provided by Causeway Films a company devoted more generally to putting quality on the screen and the backer of Jennifer Kent, Rodd Rathjen and Goran Stolevski among others. Talk to Me is also getting rather a lot of media attention and a much wider release than is usual. My goodness even as I write its being discussed on ABC Radio National Breakfast and is the ONLY film reviewed (3.5 stars awarded by Jake Wilson) in today’s hard copy version of the Sydney Morning Herald. Then again there seems to be only one other film opening this week the Finnish WW2 drama Sisu.

 

Danny and Michael Philippou, the Press Kit says, “are best known as online global sensations RackaRacka with more than 1.5 billion  views on YouTube . Named one of Variety’s 2016 FameChangers and ranked 5th on the Australian Financial Review’s Cultural Power List, the brothers are the creators of action comic horror online content, which has racked up more than 1.5 billion views and over 6.6 million subscribers on YouTube alone. Their numerous awards include Best Integrational Channel Streamy Award; Best Overall at the Online Video Awards; and AACTA Award for Best Web Show.” Well, there you are. I’m sure our mainstream film critics, whose average age is much closer to 70 than the age of the Philippou twins, likely knew nothing about any of that. So it’s a bit of a marketing triumph that the film is getting any attention at all. I suspect its pedigree with the AFF and Causeway has helped.

 

So is that going to get Talk to Me over the line and get the people now queuing for Barbie and Oppenheimer curious? Hard to say. The film-makers had the idea “about a teenage girl who gets hooked on possession by spirits which cause nightmares and violent self-destructive tendencies when delved into by kids too young to handle it as a new high.”It’s “about young people dealing with addiction and mental illness, the way that what begins as an escape from suppressed pain, can actually become a terrifying eruption of that pain.” (Anti-drug message?)

 

Is it frightening? Is it filled with dread about possible shocking physical violence? Not really…in fact its rated MA15+ and gore fans  may even find it a bit genteel, which may be why the film festival and the critics are happy enough to engage with it. It’s certainly nothing like I Spit on Your Grave or Last House on the Left. They were deeply shocking.

Streaming - Ben Cho dips a toe into the water of SHUDDER - a service devoted to presenting horror and gore

With the launch of Shudder in Australia, some may be wondering whether Australian wallets can handle yet another streaming service in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Unlike most others, and as the name suggests, Shudder is dedicating itself to horror, thrillers and genre cinema exclusively and they’ve got a few exclusives of note to try and get you to part with $6.99/month (you get the first seven days free as a trial). 

Let’s start with the biggest offering that can’t be found elsewhere on Stan, Netflix, Prime Video or Disney Plus. 

 

The near four-and-a-half-hour documentary In Search of Darkness started its life as a Kickstarter project with the aim of being the “definitive 80s horror doc” and backers pledged just under £100,000 to see it come to fruition. 

 

I guess if you’re a Universal Monsters fan the 1930s would represent the “greatest” decade for American horror but the 1970s is a strong contender for the title: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jaws, The Exorcist, Carrie, Halloween, Dawn of the Dead and Alien to name a few. 

 

But what about the 1980s? If you were a horror fan it was a pretty glorious decade to feast: The Shining, Re-Animator,Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street and the follow-ups, the Friday the 13th movies, The Thing, They Live, Day of the Dead, Night of the Creeps, Hellraiser, The Evil Dead (and its sequel), Videodrome, Aliens, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Predator, Sleepaway Camp, The Howling, The Beyond, Maniac Cop, Child’s Play, The Fly and on and on. While the 1970s probably had the established classics, my own taste veers towards the 1980s and the excess and playfulness filmmakers had with the genre. 

 

So if you’re a fan with an uncomplicated love of the period and its films, you’re going to have a lot of fun with In Search of Darkness. Most of the “iconic” films of the decade are covered and there are plenty of interviews with the icons (both behind and in front of the camera) of the period such as John Carpenter, Joe Dante, Larry Cohen, Tom Holland, Stuart Gordon, Brian Yuzna, Barbara Crampton, Doug Bradley and Nick Castle. There’s a few great anecdotes and one-liners from the filmmakers (Joe Dante especially) and it’s highly unlikely you’ll finish and not want to revisit at least some of the era’s best to savour the g(l)ory days. 

 

The documentary covers the films year-by-year with a few detours to focus on themes or trends, and it’s all presented stylishly with a generous array of clips and a suitable retro soundtrack. It might be over four hours but it’s easy to lose track of the time as the documentary glides through the years treating the films with near equal love and attention. This is a point that is bound to frustrate some and delight others: does a movie like Chopping Mall or Nightmare on Elm Street 3really deserve as much attention as They Live, Videodrome or Re-Animator? Chopping Mall is going to be “iconic” for a small subsection of genre fans but it isn’t The Evil Dead iconic. 

 

A few issues. 

 

It might be touted as the “definitive 80s horror doc” but it’s really a largely American 80s horror documentary. There’s no real mention of anything outside of the North American region but curiously Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm is covered (which is a British film). But this was an era that gave us Mr Vampire, Tetsuo, Demons, The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery, Cannibal Holocaust andTenebrae, all of which I would argue are as “iconic” as White Worm. Australia even produced horror which was worthy of coverage as much as Chopping Mall - Roadgames, Razorback and Next of Kin come to mind. 

 

The “horror influencers” they assemble to provide commentary are a mixed-bag and it could have been significantly improved by getting critics, authors or scholars to provide a bit more insight and substance to the political and social context happening in the 1980s.  Reaganism, computer technology and MTV are somewhat discussed but there’s no real exploration of the AIDS epidemic. With no real disrespect to the lead singer of metal band Slipknot, but was there no one else available to add a bit of detailed commentary to the movies being discussed from the critical community? 

 

There comes a point where you’re left to ponder what has been the legacy of this particular decade (as opposed to the 1970s) on the years that followed, and the film never really comes to grips with this. We’re being told for 4 hours of the greatness of everything from Fade to Black to The Stepfather 2but what has been the real legacy of Carpenter, Stuart Gordon, Cronenberg et al on those who followed? Was the real legacy of 1980s horror that studios worked out milking franchises for all they’re worth was the way to go (Halloween movies are still going and a Child’s Play series is in the works)? Of the main filmmakers covered, Cronenberg’s career has gone on in all kinds of brilliant and disturbing pathways; Sam Raimi made the bridge between horror and mainstream entertainment with Darkman and has had an intriguing career ever since; the master John Carpenter made a few decent post-80s titles but nothing to match the glory days; Wes Craven found success with Screamand not much else worth mentioning; Joe Dante made the classic Matinee in the 1990s and little else to match that since; and Tobe Hooper made a pretty fun TV movie with John Carpenter in the early 90s (Body Bags) but that’s pretty much it. 

 

One last quibble: the fact that The Burbs warrants mention but James Cameron’s Aliens does not is baffling. Although the Alien (at least the first two) movies have tended to merge both science fiction and horror it’s as much a “horror” movie as The Burbsor Gremlins. And while we’re there wouldn’t Ghostbusters andPredator both be worthy candidates as iconic “horror” of the period? Neither has the goriness of Re-Animator or Hellraiser but they both blend action and horror genres as much as They Livedid. 

 

If you’ve got a stack of Fangoria magazines piled up somewhere alongside a Tom Savini action figure (guilty as charged for both) then you can’t help but admire the love and dedication that has gone into this project. Many will argue that it’s little more than a “fanboy” highlights reel (it is) and it can be exhausting and superficial, two adjectives those who can’t stand horror would use to describe many of the films covered, but there’s enough here for even casual horror fans to enjoy. 

 

After watching In Search of Darkness you might be hoping to see many of the titles mentioned on Shudder but alas there’s still pretty slim pickings of the classics (you’ll still find Maniac Cop, Hellraiser and Maniac). Of the more contemporary genre films you’ll find High Tension, Goodnight Mommy, 3 Extremes, Dumplings, Timecrimes, Sightseers, It Follows, Let the Right One In, Trivisa, 31, Re:Born, One Cut of the Deadened Antiviral to name a few. It’s not an extensive library but you’ve got to imagine it will only grow from here. 

 

A few exclusives worth mentioning. One of Asia’s most exciting filmmakers Joko Anwar has two Shudder exclusives, Impetigore  and Satan’s Slaves, the former a stylishly mounted ghost story with Javanese-tinged mythology, the latter a jump-scare heavy remake of the 1980s thriller. Both are testament to superb technical craftsmanship and while neither are particularly “scary” (what is though?), they’re both clever, moody and compulsively watchable. Shudder would do well to keep snatching up Joko Anwar exclusives as he’s destined to emerge as one of the region’s most prominent (genre) filmmakers in years to come. 

 

Anthology films never really work and the 1982 George Romero horror Creepshow was no exception but on balance it has a helluva lot of pluses: good humour, Tom Savini special effects and a suitable comic book aesthetic and tone. Written by Stephen King, the shorts don’t go for the gorehound’s throat but instead replicate the experience of leafing through a well-worn 1950s EC comic. Fast forward nearly 40 years and Shudder has now released a Creepshow web streaming series with FX wizard Greg Nicotero producing (and occasionally directing). 

 

Each of the six episodes is divided into two shorts, and only the first episode’s first part has a story by Stephen King. Maybe predictably, that segment, Gray Matter, also happens to be the strongest of the 12 shorts. The rest are a mixed bag but Bad Wolf Down starring Jeffrey Combs (Re-Animator, From Beyond) is a pretty good Nazi werewolf tale and the funny Skincrawlers about a miracle weight loss program going wrong seems not too far from where we’re heading with diet fads. Also worth noting Tom Savini directs the final segment, By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain, a sort of Loch Ness tale set in the 1980s. 

 

Anything else worth noting about the Shudder lineup right now? Jeff Lieberman’s 70s LSD shocker Blue Sunshine is on there, Horror Noire which delves into the history of African-Americans in horror, the documentary Lost Soul about Richard Stanley’s experiences on The Island of Dr. Moreau and the 6-part series James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction. 

 

There might not be enough to warrant purchasing a whole year’s worth of streaming but there’s certainly a few months’ worth of genre content available. The harder question might be even though we’re at home now more than ever with all the latest Blu-rays, Netflix, Stan and Prime Video titles already out there, will casual horror fans be willing to part with their cash right now for such a limited library?