Forgive Us All

It turns out Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family had it easy. This homesteading mother must contend with viral-rage-zombies, cannibals, and over-zealous quarantine enforcers. Rather conveniently (for them), the second and third are one and the same. You can’t blame her for remaining secluded in the family cabin with her grizzled father-in-law. Unfortunately, she still blames herself for her daughter’s death, so she hopes to achieve some redemption by helping a stranger in Jordana Stott’s Forgive Us All, which releases today on UK VOD.

Rory and her late husband’s father, Otto, try to keep to themselves and maintain a low profile—for good reason. Logan and Scout are those reasons. The former is apparently the leader of a clan of cannibals who have forged an alliance with the quarantine colony managed by the latter’s colleagues. Frankly, Stott and co-screenwriters do a poor job establishing the basics of this post-apocalyptic, neo-Western world, but that is a functional hypothesis.

Regardless, Logan, Scout, and a disposable henchman are chasing Noah, because he stole a vial of their antidote to save his infected daughter. Unfortunately, he did not get away clean. Having collapsed outside the cabin, Rory shelters him for the night, despite Otto’s misgivings. Of course, the three villains soon ride up demanding they surrender Noah. They offer to ignore Rory’s quarantine violations, even though they dismiss her private property assertions. According to Logan they abolished private land ownership, so we know which side Mamdani would ride with—and once again, it is not the good guys.

Frankly, there are seeds of potential greatness in Forgive Us All, but Stott can’t do them justice. By far, her biggest sin is the sluggish pacing. Basically, this film is the Power of the Dog of zombie westerns, but only in the unflattering ways. As previously alluded to, the world-building is also decidedly sketchy.

Emergency Declaration: The Korean Airplane Outbreak

Technically, aviation writer John J. Nance already combined the viral-thriller with the airline disaster genre back in the mid-1990s, but maybe the novel Pandora's Clock and its subsequent TV-movie never made it to South Korea. Regardless, the Macguffin certainly has a whole lot more resonance now. Yet, pre-production started on the high-concept Korean thriller back in idyllic 2019. Weren’t those the days. As it turns out, this virus might have also escaped from a lab, with a little help from a psychotic in Han Jae-rim’s Emergency Declaration, which opens today in New York.

Sgt. Koo In-ho was supposed to join his beloved wife on vacation, but work forced him to cancel. As it happens, she is on the same Honolulu-bound flight with Ryu Jin-seok, a former virologist with a vicious mean-streak and a tenuous grasp on reality. He has decided to let loose a strain of secret virus he has been illegally refining and intensifying. Conveniently, there is also a spare pilot on-board, but like Robert Hays in Airplane! he carries much more baggage than the bags he checked. The disgraced Jae-hyuk is also traveling with his pre-teen daughter, to further ratchet up the stakes for him.

Due to some old-fashioned police work, Koo manages to sleuth out Ryu’s intentions before chaos totally erupts on the plane, but after the release of the viral agent. Naturally, the captain is one of the first to fall sick. It seems pretty clear co-pilot Hyun-soo will be needing Jae-hyuk eventually, but he still blames the former pilot for his wife’s death.

So, there is a lot to deal with here. Sook-hee, the transportation minister will generally be helpful, but Tae-su of the president’s crisis management team is obviously shifty. Altogether, Emergency Dec has everything an Airport movie could want, except George Kennedy. Han dexterously juggles all the subplots and keeps the tension tightly wound. Since this is a Korean film, the suspense is particularly high, because you never know, this really could all end in tears.

Mayhem: Office Rage

Towers & Smythe is supposedly a soulless corporate consultancy shingle where downtrodden Derek Cho plugs away, but it makes no sense to have them foreclosing on private homes and planning legal strategy for criminal law cases. Basically, they are a catchall for whatever evil doings might be perpetrated by men in Brooks Brothers suits. Ironically, recent events make it painfully clear the least ethical businesses in America are actually film studios, but that might hit too close to home. In any event, logic is supposed to go by the wayside when a crazy inhibition-lifting virus breaks out. The sharks of Towers & Smythe find themselves under so-called quarantine, but it is really just an invitation for Purge­-style bedlam, sans the hollow social commentary in Joe Lynch’s Mayhem (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Poor Cho is the one stuck telling Melanie Cross Towers & Smythe has no intention of working with her to prevent foreclosure on her house (again, this makes no business sense). What comes around, goes around quite quickly, when he learns his rival has set him up to take the fall for a mishandled client shortly thereafter. Just as Cho is being escorted out of the building, the ID-7 virus hits. As fate would have it, Cho was the one who developed the legal strategy that resulted in legal immunity for the ID-7-infected, which is the sort of work he would never be doing at a company like Towers & Smythe.

In an effort to contain the loose cannons, Cho is chucked into the basement with the trouble-making Cross. A grudging alliance is quickly forged and the two are soon wreaking havoc on T&S’s property and client list. However, old man Towers figures ID-7 is a two-way street and therefore dispatches his goons to whack Cho and Cross, all of whom really have lost their moral-ethical inhibitions.

Basically, Mayhem is the horror-comedy version of The Raid, in which Cho and Cross fight their way up the building to the penthouse boardroom, floor by floor. On that level, it is a smashing success. Even though our protags are definitely out for payback, most of their kills are largely committed in self-defense.

To his credit, Lynch is not shy about drenching the film in blood and attitude. No sir, he is not. Yet, Mayhem really works because of immensely charming chemistry of its leads, Steven Yuen and Samara Weaving. It is just impossible not to root for these underdogs and hope their budding romance works out, even when they are killing and maiming with wild abandon.

Let’s put it this way, there is so much meathead fun in Mayhem, it will rekindle your 1990s enthusiasm for the Dave Matthews Band. Cho is a fan, so you’d better be too. Frankly, it really isn’t horror per se (and it sure as shooting isn’t “post-horror”), but it probably helps if you have a fan’s tolerance threshold for on-screen blood and ruthless sense of humor. Recommended for everyone who enjoys sensitive coming of age dramas and online cat videos, Mayhem opens tomorrow (11/10) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

Future Imperfect: The Year of the Plague

The doctor considers it a Crichton-esque super-virus. His musician-lover sees it more as the pent-up release of the masses’ accumulated physical and spiritual pestilence. Either way, it is a stretch to call this outbreak drama science fiction. Indeed, the impulse to sweep the mounting crisis under the rug is acutely human, in the worst way. The cover-up will be just as deadly as the disease in Felipe Cazals’ The Year of the Plague, which screens during MoMA’s ongoing film series, Future Imperfect: The Uncanny in Science Fiction.

It is odd Year of the Plague is not more frequently screened, because the screenplay was co-written by Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez (with José Agustín and Juan Arturo Brennan). Supposedly, it is based on Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, but it bears more of a likeness to Camus’s The Plague. Dr. Genovés is a senior attending physician at a leading Mexican university hospitality, who has no trouble recognizing the early stages of a plague from the fifty-some suspicious cases he has seen so far. However, his superiors and the government easily bury the plague victims amid the thousands of other people who died during the same time period due to more pedestrian urban pathologies. As a consolation, Genovés will commence an affair with a much younger and prettier aspiring musician.

Literally mountains of corpses start to pile up, but they know how to take care of that down there. When a Norwegian cabinet minister also succumbs to the plague, the government will recklessly and unethically send his body home with a deceptive congestive heart failure diagnosis and no environmental safeguards. Of course, he is the exception. Most of the plague’s victims simply don’t count for much.

Peste is an ultra-1970s-looking film, presented in a pseudo-documentary style, but with spare room here and there for dramatic character development. As a result, it is hard to forge an emotional connection with the film, even though it features several musical interludes. Yet, its retro-ness is also one of its greatest appeals. Frankly, watching polyester-wearing bureaucrats villainously scheme amid groovy office décor is always a cool nostalgia trip.

The docudrama approach necessarily hems in the cast, but Alejandro Parodi (bearing a vague resemblance to Mike “Touch” Connors) has the sort of presence you would want from your viral outbreak doctor. However, for Cazals and García Márquez, the real stars of the film are those dump trucks and mass graves overflowing with corpses.

Clearly, García Márquez was using the Plague as a metaphor for what he thought ailed society in the 1970s. It didn’t make much sense that his solution was to invest more power in centralized governments and further disenfranchise the individual as a political and economic free agent, but Latin American Leftism was never about logic. It was about faith in a secular god that failed. Year of the Plague is a strange time capsule from that overheated era, but its visuals and paranoid vibe still retain some potency for contemporary viewers. Worth checking out as a colorful product of its time, The Year of the Plague screens again tomorrow afternoon (8/13) at MoMA, as part of Future Imperfect.