CIFF ’15: Bite

Oozing pus is generally white, so it should be perfectly fine for a wedding. Casey sure has a lot of it going on, but if truth be told, the bride-to-be already had serious cold feet before leaving on her bachelorette getaway. Unfortunately, she came back with a nasty case of body horror in Chad Archibald’s Bite (trailer here), which screens during the 2015 Chicago International Film Festival.

While carousing in Costa Rica, Jill constantly films everything, but not because this is a found footage movie. She is just annoying. However, the source of her passive aggression quickly becomes apparent. She has long carried a torch for Jared Kennedy, the fiancé Casey is considering jilting. Still, they have plenty of Latin American fun, despite the mysterious whatever that bit Casey while she was bobbing in a secluded swimming hole. In fact, she had so much fun, she even lost her wedding ring.

Obviously, things are awkward for Casey when she gets home, especially since she feels like death warmed over. She comes close to breaking it off, which seems like an even better idea after a frosty encounter with her prospective mother-in-law, who also happens to be her landlord. However, her body starts to change before she can do anything decisive. Her bite wound festers something fierce, leaking grossness everywhere. Her skin gets scaly and her behavior takes a belligerent, anti-social turn. Suddenly, there are red mutant caviar eggs from Hell all over the apartment. Yet, we are told the smell is the worst of all.

So yeah, body horror. Yet, Bite is way grabbier than most Kafka knockoffs because of Casey’s sharply drawn relationships with her friends, “cool chick” Kirsten and uber-bitch Jill. In fact, Archibald and screenwriter Jayme LaForest depict their conversations and interactions with a lot of truth and attitude.

Of course Bite is first and foremost about goo and disturbingly colored bodily fluids. Clearly, special makeup artist Jason Derushie had a field day crafting one freaky effect after another, the grossness of each should well please genre fans. Still, Elma Begovic gives a really solid performance under all that gook. Denise Yuen is also refreshingly down-to-earth and sensitively engaging as Kirsten. On the other hand, it is hard to understand why anyone would be interested in a shrinking violet like Jordan Gray’s Kennedy, with his anemic Justin Bieber facial hair.

Although Bite does not reinvent body horror, it executes the Cronenbergian subgenre with superior characterization and gross-out effects. Frankly, it might be Archibald’s best film to date, representing a major improvement over Ejecta and The Drownsman. Recommended for horror fans in the mood for some claustrophobic grotesqueness, Bite screens tonight (10/23) and tomorrow night (10/24), as part of this year’s Chicago International Film Festival.

CIFF ’15: The Laundryman

It is both his cover and euphemism for what he does. Ostensibly, he works for a neighborhood laundry service, but he specializes in removing “stains” from clients’ lives. He is a coolly dispassionate hitman, with support staff to help with the cleaning. However, he will have to seek professional help of a different sort when his recent victims start haunting him in Lee Chung’s The Laundryman (trailer here), which screens during the 2015 Chicago International Film Festival.

His boss A-gu is the rainmaker and he does the dirty work. For years, this arrangement has worked for “No. 1, Chingtian Street.” Yes, that is what he is known as, to the few who know the contract killer (it is a long story that will be revealed in due time). He leads a rather solitary life, but that makes it easy for the stunningly beautiful A-gu to manipulate him. They go way back, in an ambiguous way. When he finds himself genuinely haunted, she refers him to nightclub psychic Lin Hsiang. Despite her hipster style, she is legitimate enough to see the abusive self-styled ladies’ man he just offed and the old couple he whacked before him. However, he has no idea who the silent young woman ghost is or was.

With Lin’s help, he will track down the customers who paid for their hits, in order to satisfy their curiosity and hopefully move them along into the spirit realm. Complicating matters, a sinister party seems to be trying to thwart them. The resulting chaos also attracts the attention of a soon to retire police inspector. It gets to the point where a hitman doesn’t know who to trust.

Although Laundryman starts out as a comedy, it gets real serious, real fast. Lee and Chen Yu-hsun have written a surprisingly complex tale of betrayal and dark secrets from the past, freely incorporating all kinds of genre elements cafeteria-style. It is a wild ride, but they keep us safely buckled into the roller coaster.

Rising star Joseph Chang Hsiao-chuan has the perfect brooding physicality for No. 1, Chingtian Street, not unlike his quietly ominous work in Soul. He also develops some radically different but equally credible chemistry with Sonia Sui Tang as the particularly fatal femme fatale A-gu and Wan Qian’s Lin, the increasingly sober and freaked out party girl psychic. These are not your standard genre film types, even before Lee thoroughly disrupts their worlds.

Lee fully capitalizes on the cinematic creepiness of A-gu’s laundry facility, settling into a zone best described as supernatural noir. Yet, despite the general moodiness (heightened by Yao Hung-i’s eerie cinematography), he maintains a vigorous pace. Frankly, The Laundryman is exactly the sort of foreign film that feels ripe for a wildly inferior Hollywood remake, but it would be especially daunting to follow in Sui’s compulsively scene-stealing footprints. Highly recommended as a first class supernatural mystery, The Laundryman screens Friday (10/16) and Tuesday (10/20), as part of this year’s Chicago International Film Festival.