Brooklyn Horror ’25: Tales from the Woods

These fairy tales often leave the “happily” out of “every after,” but if you read the original Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, they often did so too. Not surprisingly, the genre filmmakers participating in this series of fairy tale-based short films had no trouble relating to their chosen stories, even though they often took extensive liberties. Nevertheless, the results still vary amongst the three short films in the Tales from the Woods series that screened at this year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.

By far, the most successful is Mattie Do’s Sleeping Beauty, which turns Princess Aurora into a Fisher King curse. The Laotian filmmaker (The Long Walk, Dearest Sister) transfers the French folk tale to colonial Vietnam, where the governor’s biracial son Philippe falls under the spell of the sleeping beauty and brings her home to meet his parents.

Unfortunately, no amount of kissing will wake her up, but that doesn’t bother Philippe. His mother Dao recognizes the source of his bewitchment from folk legends, but she is too timid to act accordingly, even if it brings ruin to her family and the surrounding community. Obviously, Do incorporates some rather provocative taboo themes, but they deliver a subversive twist to the familiar fairy tale. Sonadala Sihavong is also terrific, in a crushingly human way, as Dao.

Surprisingly, the weakest constituent short film comes from the usually mind-bending filmmaker-tandem of Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead (Spring, The Endless, Synchronic, Something in the Dirt). Jacques the Giant Slayer opens with an intriguing late 19^th Century expedition vibe, but the creature encounter underwhelms.

Things Will Be Different

It was supposed to be the ultimate “time-out.” The cops will never find these sibling outlaws’ time-slip hideout, but someone or something else has access to their sanctuary in director-screenwriter Michael Felker’s Things Will Be Different, which releases this Friday in theaters and on VOD.

Joseph and Sidney share some stormy family history, but they still sufficiently trust each other to pull off an armed heist. Their getaway could have been cleaner, but Joseph charted an unusual escape route. Apparently, this quiet farmhouse has the power to travel to some distant point in time, where they can simply wait out the cops. For each day spent in this mysterious other time, an equal day passes in the time-period the siblings left. They figure two weeks should be sufficient for the heat to blow over, but Sidney will still be home before her daughter misses her so badly.

However, just as brother and sister are about to triumphantly stride through that strange door, they find it mysteriously boarded up, with instructions to meet at the farm’s old mill. By using an old Dictaphone as a means of interdimensional, or intertime communication, the siblings learn the strange forces governing the farm are aware of their intrusion and they are not happy about it. However, all will be forgiven if they stay to capture and kill the violent “time bandits” using the portals for their own sinister ends. Of course, they agree, because what choice do they have, but the waiting takes a considerable toll, mentally and emotionally.

As weird as that sounds, Felker builds the premise and the rules of the world quite convincingly. This is gritty, grounded, lo-fi science fiction in the best sense. Frankly, viewers never get a full picture of the system that entraps the brother and sister, but the partial snapshot is pretty trippy. Technically, Things Will Be Different involves time-travel, but it really is very much its own thing. It is worth noting Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, the team behind films like Spring, The Endless, and Synchronic served as executive producers and played supporting roles. Felker’s film should definitely appeal to their fans, both thematically and stylistically.

Lynch/Oz

The line "I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” has become an easy shorthand quote to suggest a character’s old assumptions about how the world works have just been turned on their head. It is the sort of thing David Lynch’s protagonists might say. Maybe they did. I honestly don’t remember if that precise line was included in the super-cuts of Wizard of Oz allusions seen throughout Alexandre O. Philippe’s latest cinematically-themed documentary. However, it should be reasonably safe to conclude Lynch has seen the 1939 classic fantasy and it made some kind of impression on the auteur after watching Lynch/Oz, which opens this Friday in New York.

Evidently, film critic Amy Nicolson and genre filmmakers Rodney Ascher, John Waters, Karyn Kusama, Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead, and David Lowery having been thinking about Oz as an important source of Lynch’s inspiration for some time, because they each get one section of the film to draw their connections.

Frankly, they all make a very compelling case—so much so that Lynch/Oz will have most viewers completely convinced after the first part. However, there are five more sections, which largely repeat the same points. After a while, all the Oz-like motifs in Lynch’s oeuvre, such as the red shoes, mysterious curtains, doppelgangers, and the porous boundaries between dreams and reality, become repetitive. We get it. Lynch definitely alludes to Oz in many of his films. Case closed.

Indeed, Lynch/Oz shares the prime fault of Philippe’s previous documentary, The Taking, in that all his participating commentators share the same opinions and make the same arguments. There are no crazy outliers (as there were in Ascher’s Room 237) or dissenting opinions (as in Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood). It is just the same talking points, repeated five times over. Waters gives it more of a personal spin and Ascher takes a more macro perspective on Oz’s overall influence on American cinema in general, but there are no conflicts in the six analyses Philippe presents.

Benson & Moorhead’s Something in the Dirt

Maybe it is no accident Los Angeles is such an unlivable city. Maybe it was part of a deliberate conspiracy. That is a pretty sinister thought, but two down-on-their-luck losers are pretty are starting to believe it. Somehow, it all relates to the strange and potentially otherworldly force that manifests itself in their apartment building throughout Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead’s Something in the Dirt, which opens Friday in New York.

Levi Danube has just moved into John Daniels’ dingy little complex, occupying that one unit that has not been rented for years. While lending him some furniture, Daniels witnesses some kind of something—like a trick of the light, but more. Eventually, Danube sees it too, so they decide to start studying and recording it. The ultimate goal would be to release the ostensive documentary we’re now watching, but don’t worry. This is not found footage.

It also becomes clear from brief interviews with the various editors and technical advisors the two neighbors brought in, their collaboration process was not entirely smooth. For one thing, Daniels will be a bit disturbed to discover Danube’s sex offender record. Conversely, Danube becomes increasingly uncomfortable with his partner’s rapid descent into conspiracy theory mania. Daniels starts to suspect the phenomenon they witness in his sort-of-friend’s apartment is related to Pythagorean cults, which perhaps dictated the original design of the city of Los Angeles. It is hard to really explain the foxholes they dive into, but the visuals are pretty cool.

Benson and Moorhead are talented genre filmmakers, who also appear this time around as Danube and Daniels, respectively. Clearly, they have a firm grasp on conspiratorial paranoia. Based on Something, the filmmaking duo would be the perfect candidates to direct an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. That is a short book for a reason, though. The nearly two-hour Something would have been much stronger if it had pared back some of the two neighbors’ bickering and kvetching.

Still, there is so much detail to their paranoid vision, Something will have viewers diving into their own rabbit-holes out of curiosity. Good luck finding any info on Los Angeles city planner and Pythagorean cultist William Thomson. Regardless, it is clear they have absorbed a lot of conspiracy theories, because they understand the elements that hook people in.

Moorhead & Benson’s Synchronic

It might be a trip, but it isn’t necessarily fun to take. However, it is great to watch from the safety of the audience’s perspective. In this case, the very latest designer drug has an especially heavy kick. It alters the mind’s perspective of time, inducing literal time travel. Of course, getting back is the difficult part in Synchronic, the latest film from Moorhead & Benson (a.k.a. Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead), which just opened in actual theaters (but obviously not in the City).

Steve Danube and Dennis Dannelly have been seeing some pretty horrifying things recently when responding to calls as New Orleans paramedics. The crime scenes are inexplicably surreal, but there is one commonality, the newest synthetic: Synchronic. Sadly, double-pronged tragedy will soon hit very close to home for both first responders. Dannelly’s daughter Brianna will mysteriously disappear while taking Synchronic at a college party and Danube will be diagnosed with a brain tumor. As fate would have it, the growth is right above his pineal gland.

Sick of the destruction wrought by Synchronic, Danube buys up all the remaining borderline-legal stock, but doing so, he draws the attention of a stranger who knows its time-traveling secret. Evidently, it works through the pineal gland, which usually calcifies for those who reach their third responsible decade or so, but Danube’s has been kept ironically and unhealthily young. To find Brianna, he will take a series of spectacularly bad trips, with each one steadily depleting his supply.

Moorhead & Benson are emerging as masters of genre films that are mind-bending, but also powerfully emotionally charged. As with their prior collaborations, Benson handles the screenwriting on his own, but Synchronicity is clearly very much shaped and informed by their partnership. To a large extent, the film portrays all the hard work necessary to make bromance work, long after the equivalent of the bro honeymoon. Yet, they still pull us in with an intriguing genre hook—in this case a take on time travel that we really haven’t seen before.

Anthony Mackie is flat-out terrific as Danube. It is a complex portrayal of a flawed man, who shifts from being angry at the world and life in general to an acute concern over some very extreme developments—that’s called growing up. He banters and spars with Jamie Dornan’s Dannelly quite effectively, but the chemistry he develops with Ally Ioannides, as Brianna, is even more interesting. It is the kind of jury-rigged family relationships that are so important in real-life, but are rarely seen on film.

Tribeca ’19: Something Else

You never see a film where things are perfect in the present, but miserable in the past, wherein the flashbacks explain how things got good. Instead, it is an idyllic past that slowly turns into a rotten present. Hank’s movie life is a perfect example. He was madly in love with Abby, but one day she just up and leaves him with no warning. Shortly thereafter, a sinister monster starts terrorizing him at night—maybe—in Jeremy Gardner & Christian Stella’s Something Else, which screens during the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival.

When they first got together, Hank was totally ga-ga over Abby, but he never did cotton to the idea of marriage. Maybe that is part of the reason she silently bailed. He takes it hard, but to make matter worse, a strange beast starts beating and scratching on the doors of his rambling farmhouse late at night. Outsiders just assume the increasingly sweaty and irritable Hank is just under some kind of delusion. Of course, his erratic, shotgun wielding behavior does not help much.

Still, at some point, his cop brother-in-law ought to look at the deep scratches on his door and admit they are a trifle odd. Instead, he just explains them away as bears or panthers or some kind of freak boating accident. On the other hand, it is tough to get too comfortable with Jeremy Gardner’s bulging eyes and jittery performance as Hank. Even though we have certain expectations as genre movie fans, Gardener makes us constantly question them.

As Abby, Brea Grant also plays it scrupulously straight and shows tremendous respect for the genre in her scenes opposite Gardener. In several keys scenes, they have the same level of intensity and ferocity you would expect to see if they were doing a Tracy Letts play instead of a grungy midnight movie.

Weirdly, Something Else shares a number of similarities with producers Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead’s Spring. Both films combine love, the pain of frustrated relationships, and weird monster business. However, Something Else’s aesthetics are definitely more redneck and slightly more mumblecore than the elegantly operatic Spring. In this case, Benson also scores most of the film’s biggest laughs portraying Hank’s goofy crony, Shane.

It would be spoilery to explain how, but timing is everything in Something Else. Gardener & Stella definitely have a keen intuitive sense of when to keep their powder dry and when to pull out the rug from us. They are greatly aided by the way Gardener and Grant pull us into the characters’ intimate drama. It might be too restrained for some horror fans, but those who appreciate Benson & Moorhead’s more relationship-driven films should enjoy it. Recommended for fans of subtle and sinister genre-blurring films, Something Else screens tonight (4/27), tomorrow night (4/28), and Sunday (5/5), as part of this year’s Tribeca.

Tribeca ’17: The Endless

Maybe the hippie commune Justin Smith rescued his younger brother Aaron from was not quite the “castrating doomsday UFO cult” he thought it was, but you still would not call it a New Religious Movement. Regardless, the brothers are probably not being unduly alarmist when they assume the worst from a “goodbye” video they receive from a former friend. Against the older brother’s better judgement, they will visit their former “family” before they “ascend” in Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead’s The Endless, which screens during the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival.

Frankly, one look at the smiling tool standing at the gate of Camp Arcadia would have made us do an immediate one-eighty. The anti-social fellow who keeps brusquely walking in straight lines is also rather off-putting. However, Anna, their big sister figure is as lovely and welcoming as ever—and she hardly seems to have aged at all.

In contrast, life has been hard for the brothers in the years that followed their Camp Arcadia escape. In fact, Aaron remembers the plentiful food and kumbaya gatherings rather fondly. Justin was hoping their visit would serve as an antidote to his nostalgia, but it might have the opposite effect. However, after the older brother gets the heave-ho from Arcadia, he stumbles into the truth. The real secret of Camp Arcadia is truly Hellish in a Sisyphean sense, but the camper cultists have embraced it out of their warped hippy spirituality.

There is no question the big reveal and its implications takes a while to unpack. However, it mostly all tallies, once you account for the varying severity of the x-factor in question. In any event, the cosmic scope and ambition of Endless are quite impressive, especially considering the intimate scale of the drama. Filmmaking partners Benson and Moorhead are terrific as the Smith Brothers. They really demonstrate the fine line between love and resentment, constantly crossing over and back. Perhaps drawing on their experience making Resolution, Spring, and the “Bonestorm” segment of V/H/S Viral, B&M really project a sense of the brothers’ long, chaotic shared history together.

In all honesty, The Endless is one of the more intelligent and emotionally sophisticated genre films you will see all year, but it has received unfairly middling notices thus far at Tribeca. This may well be due to the cult-themed subject matter. At a time when the advocacy-media is promoting large-scale demonstrations, any film that problematizes acquiescence to the moral judgement of the collective unit is likely to face instinctive resistance, so to speak.

That will be a real shame if it successfully dampens the enthusiasm of fans of Benson & Moorhead’s prior films. Smart, tense, and psychologically realistic, The Endless is highly recommended for fans of cult movies (in both senses) when it screens again tonight (4/26) and Saturday (4/29), as part of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Spring: Love Comes on Stealthy Tentacles

When Evan saw Louise, it is like a scene from a Sophia Loren film or Ruth Orkin’s famous photo. In this case, he is the visiting American, while she is very definitely a seductive Italian. Eventually, he learns there is considerably more to her than meets the eye. The truth comes as a shock, but it is not enough to dissuade him from wooing the mystery woman in Benson & Moorhead’s Spring (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Evan should have gotten out of his dead-end burg long ago, but his father’s untimely death and his mother’s protracted illness kept him anchored to their old home. When she finally succumbs, there is little holding him there, but a drunken brawl with a vengeful gang member gives him every reason to leave. On his buddy’s advice, his hurriedly departs on the Italian trip his father always wanted to take. Initially, he takes the youth hostel route, falling in with some obnoxious Brits. Frankly, Evan can hardly stand them, but he tags along on their excursion to Puglia anyway. When he sees the town’s old world charm and Louise’s sultry beauty, he decides to stay.

Initially, Louise is adamantly opposed to any sort of long term entanglement, but Evan slowly wears down her objections. He even finds lodging and employment with Angelo, a sympathetic farmer outside of town. However, unbeknownst to Evan, Louise requires regular injections to halt her transformation into something slimy and Lovecraftian. As she eventually explains to Evan, her cyclical condition is getting increasingly severe. When it reaches its regular twenty year apex, it will be dashed dangerous for him to be around her. As a trained genetic biologist who has gone through this process a time or to before, she knows of what she speaks. Yet, Evan is not prepared to cut-and-run on their relationship just yet.

Benson & Moorhead (as the filmmaker partners Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead prefer to be billed) have really raised the dramatic standard of genre films with Spring. They take their time fully establishing the characters of Evan and Louise and the dynamics of their relationship, before introducing the exquisite bizarreness lurking below the surface. Frankly, their early courtship scenes work quite well on their own merits, separate and apart from the strange developments that follow. Yet, the particulars of who Louise is and how she continues to exist over time are well thought out and scrupulously observe their own internal logic. Indeed, the third act never feels like a tacked-on curve ball from left field, but rather the culmination of the careful groundwork laid by the cast and filmmakers.

A well-deserved award winner at last year’s Fantastic Fest, Lou Taylor Pucci is unusually compelling as Evan, offsetting his impulsive punkiness with a deeper sensitivity. He also develops some powerful romantic chemistry with Nadia Hilker’s Louise. Although much more reserved (when not writhing in the agonizing throes of her uncanny convulsions), Hilker vividly suggests the world-weariness and emotional baggage one might associate with the more romantic strain of vampires. Veteran Italian thespian also provides a rock solid moral anchor for the film as the gruff but compassionate Angelo.

Spring is a terrific film precisely because it takes its time and trusts the audience’s maturity and discernment. It takes a road not often taken in genre cinema, reaping distinctive results. Moorhead’s darkly stylish cinematography heightens the mood, both with respects to the romance and the creeping dread, perfectly serving the macabrely dreamy narrative. Very highly recommended for fans of crossover classics, Spring opens this Friday (3/20) in New York, at the Cinema Village.