Obituary, on Hulu

The old joke about people dying to get into the cemetery applies to the obituaries as well. Unfortunately, for freelance obituary writer Elvira Clancy, they are not dying quickly enough in her not so quaint Irish village. She starts helping along Kilraven’s the oldest and meanest citizens, but of course, unexpected consequences invariably result in writer-creator Rudy Lawlor’s six-part  Obituary, which premieres tomorrow on Hulu.

Living in Kilraven is generally grim, but it is especially so for ragingly neurotic Clancy. She lives with her alcoholic father Ward, who is drinking to forget something. Her childhood defender, Mallory Markum, remains her only friend. However, they are both seriously attracted to the paper’s new crime reporter, Emerson Stafford, who seems over-qualified for such a low-profile publication. It turns out he was personally recruited/blackmailed to come to Kilraven by his terminally ill predecessor, Clive Cavendish, to solve the decade-old murder of German national Maria Riedle.

The death-obsessed Clancy is happy with the obit beat. She just needs more work, so she soon decides to create some business for herself. However, she has strict rules, like her victims must be over 18-years-old and basically have it coming. Much to Clancy’s surprise, one of her near-misses turns over a new leaf, which spurs her boss, Hughie Burns to also start poking around the Riedle case again. It turns out just about everyone she knows has a hard-to-explain connection to the case, including Clancy herself.

Lawlor’s homicidal obit-writer premise is pretty sly, but his twists and turns take it to a higher level. The way evil karma keeps coming back around, over and over again, is quite clever. This really is some impressively slick television writing.

Death and Nightingales, on Starz

In 1885, Northern Ireland was a land divided by religion. So is Beth Winters’ house. Her stepfather Billy Winters is a wealthy English Protestant landlord, whereas she is not. Nor was her late mother Catherine, who secretly knew she was already pregnant with Beth when she married the hard-drinking Englishman. The Winters family dynamics have only gotten worse since her death and finally come to a head in creator-director Allan Cubitt’s 3-part Death and Nightingales, which premieres Sunday on Starz.

As a young girl, Winters heard her stepfather angrily disavow her and it hurt—even after he disavowed his disavowal in a more sober moment. Regardless, since her mother died, he treated Beth more like a servant than a daughter, especially when he inappropriately visited her bedroom late at night. She has always deeply resented him, yet their awkward shared history created a sort of dysfunctional bond between them. However, she finally resolves to make a break when she meets the dashing Liam Ward, Winters’ new IRA-supporting tenant.

Despite some mixed emotions, the smitten Winters agrees to slip Old Billy a bromide mickey and empty his safe, so she and Ward may elope and start a new life together. Fatefully, it will all go down on the day of her 23^rd birthday. Of course, this kind of business never goes according to plan.

Evidently, Cubitt rather faithfully adapted Eugene McCabe’s similar-titled novel, but a bit pruning and narrative concentration would not have been amiss. Frankly, the entire first episode is ponderously slow and not especially eventful. The middle hour picks up the pace a bit, while the conclusion delivers some pretty intense, slap-in-the-face drama.

Ann Skelly really delivers down the stretch as the surprisingly resourceful Beth Winters. She has moments that largely redeem the series. Unfortunately, viewers have to slog through a lot of aimless angst and melodrama to get to them. Ordinarily, it would be quite entertaining to watch Matthew Rhys rage and roar as Billy Winters, during the episode one and two, but Cubitt makes him such an unsavory, predatory figure, it is impossible to embrace him as a love-to-hate character.

Sundance ’21: Censor

The truth is film censors make totally logical horror movie characters, because they obviously love to cut. Some enterprising shlock-meister ought to turn that play on words into a full-on slasher movie. Writer-director Prano Bailey-Bond goes in the opposite direction, suggesting there really is something dangerous about the images her protagonist seeks to suppress. However, she has to watch the gore before demanding cuts, which forces her to see some pretty disturbing scenes that maybe not so coincidentally hit uncomfortably close to home in Bailey-Bond’s Censor, which screens again today as part of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Enid Baines really believes in her job as a British film censor. In the mid-1980’s, her work largely involves trimming the notorious “video nasties.” These were low-budget VHS releases that were vilified and even prosecuted for excessive violence. It is worth noting Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead and several Fulci films were on the nasty list, so clearly one man’s nastiness is another man’s art, but we digress.

Baines considers them all nasty, but she tries to be reasonable in the cuts she demands. She thought she was fairly well desensitized to on-screen violence, but she is thrown for a loop when a new nasty appears to re-enact the childhood disappearance of her long-lost sister. The leering producer, Doug Smart, also seemed to know it would strike a chord with her. Her review screening launches her down a rabbit hole, where nasty fiction and grim reality blend together.

The basic Macguffin of Censor has a lot of potential, but Bailey-Bond does not fully exploit the creepy meta-ness of nasty “art” imitating real life and the inevitable inverse, whereby real life killings are possibly committed to create on-screen murders. This is a little counter-intuitive to say, but Bailey-Bond might be a little too concerned with Baines’ inner angsts and traumas, concentrating too much on her head-space, at the expense head-tripping game-playing.

The truth is the boundary between lurid horror-movies-within-horror-movies and their revolted viewers was much more compellingly violated in Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio. Astron-6’s The Editor also addresses these themes in a more entertaining way. In contrast, Bailey-Bond and co-screenwriter Anthony Fletcher never fully assemble a hall of mirrors for the viewer to get lost in, so we are always pretty sure where we are, even if Baines isn’t.

Tank 432: War is Hell, Like Really

The M41 Walker Bulldog tank was considered a big step up from its M24 Chaffee predecessor. Its armoring was much more protective and its weaponry was more effective. The only drawback was its especially cramped quarters, even by armored tank standard. You would not want to hole up in one for long with an enemy combatant and a civilian, but nothing will go according to plan for this military unit—or perhaps this was the plan all along, for at least one of them. One thing is certain. They are being played by something or someone, but it is not clear just how earthly their woes are in Nick Gillespie’s Tank 432 (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

The film opens with the unit in full panic. They have already lost a number of men, plus the moaning and groaning Capper does not look long for the world. We do not get a good look at the forces they are retreating from, but they obviously have the grizzled combat vets badly spooked. As if they needed another cause for concern, a weaponized powdered substance also appears to be in use. It is a chaotic scene, but Smith, their commander persists in leading about two hooded prisoners, who apparently were the objective all along.

As Reeves (the closest they have to level-headed) and Gantz (the snarling hard-charger) reconnoiter, they discover a civilian hostage (or whatever) stashed in a storage locker. She is a bit of a basket case, but their medic Karlsson has plenty of zonk-out injections. They make quite a motley crew when the enemy forces them to take shelter in an immobilized Bulldog. A malfunctioning door trapping them inside makes the situation even more awkward.

In this hyper-paranoid age, the big twist ending comes as no great surprise, at least as far as Gillespie can be bothered to reveal it. Having frequently served as a cameraman on Ben Wheatley’s films (who returns the favor executive producing Tank 432), Gillespie shows a similar affinity for slyly implied narrative revelations, except he is probably even more coy about it.

Fortunately, he also has Wheatley regular Michael Smiley, who absolutely crushes it as the not-quite-as-done-for-as-he-looks Capper. He basically revives the film with a nail-spitting bravura display of hostile attitude. Similarly, Steve Garry’s Gantz almost single-handedly powers along the first two acts with his hardnosed barking. These are exactly the kind of performances that make genre films. Gordon Kennedy also practically chews his way out of the bulldog as the highly suspicious Smith, while Deirdre Mullins helps ground the film as the gritty but charismatic Karlsson.

Gillespie earns credit for helming a tense, unsettling viewing experience. Nobody’s attention will wander during the film, but it ends on a rather unsatisfying note and it does not add up to very much when you take stock of it after the fact. Genre fans should still appreciate his command of the vaguely dystopian near future mise en scene and the vibe of mounting dread. Recommended for Wheatley fans, Tank 432 opens this Friday (11/25) in New York, at the IFC Center.