FrightFest ’18: The Golem

This creature of Kabballah looks nothing like German silent film star Paul Wagener. Instead, he resembles the young son still mourned by the woman (now presumed barren) who created him. That will make him especially dangerous when he turns against those he is supposed to protect (like Skynet or Cujo) in Doron & Yoav Paz’s first English language film, The Golem (trailer here), which premiered during this year’s FrightFest in the UK.

Frankly, in this isolated 17^th Century Lithuanian Jewish village, there are not a lot of educational opportunities for women in general, but the study of Kabballah and mystical texts is strictly prohibited. Nevertheless, Hanna eavesdrops on the Rabbi’s lectures and pours over the books her husband Benjamin reluctantly smuggles home for her. Alas, she is not nearly as intimidated by the subject matter as are the Rabbi’s properly male students. That means only she will have the guts to create a golem to protect the village from a rampaging feudal lord, but she might not have the strength to destroy the creature when it brings out all her maternal instincts.

Stylistically, the Paz’s Brothers’ Golem is dramatically different than the found footage conceit of their first feature, JeruZalem, but it definitely taps into some deep Jewish folkloric themes and tropes. This is as much a dark fable as it is a horror film, but it shares a kinship with the Frankenstein/Modern Prometheus and Faust archetypes, along with the Golem legend. Fate is a killer in this film, just like the Golem.

Israeli thesp Hani Furstenberg (recognizable to hardcore cineastes for her starring role in Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Place) is pretty impressive as Hanna, fully connecting with both the maternal and feminist elements of her character. Daniel Cohen makes quite a creepy kid playing “Hanna’s Son.” Frankly, none of the other male characters is a well-developed as Hanna, but they look and act era appropriate amid all the chaos and carnage.

Despite the dissimilarities of their two features, the Paz Brother consistently show a knack for projecting a vibe of ancient, soul-shattering evil. It is a moody film, sort of like The Witch, but it also seriously portrays the harsh realities of shtetl life in Old Europe. Recommended for fans of serious period horror films, The Golem is slated to open theatrically next year, following its premiere at this year’s FrightFest.

FrightFest ’18: Tigers Are Not Afraid

These are not Dickensian street urchins. They are the orphans of Mexico’s drug wars. They survive hand-to-mouth on the streets, constantly fleeing the victorious drug cartel of sadistic Satanists. Yeah, maybe building that wall doesn’t sound so bad anymore. Regardless, fairy tales do not get much darker than Issa Lopez’s Tigers Are Not Afraid (trailer here), which screens during this year’s FrightFest in the UK.

Estrella is on her own. Her school was closed indefinitely after getting riddled with bullets. Soon thereafter, her mother failed to come home one night. The implications are obvious in Estrella’s world, but she remains in denial for what seems like weeks. Eventually, hunger forces her to seek the company of a local gang of misfits, but their leader Shine is instinctively hostile to an older potential rival.

Nevertheless, she will earn her place in the pack when she apparently completes a rather daring task, but the truth is rather more complicated. Regardless, she inadvertently antagonizes the cartel affiliated with the local political boss, as a result. On top of that, Estrella also has weird visions—or perhaps they really are supernatural visitations.

Lopez loads up TANA heavy fairy tale symbolism involving princesses, tigers, serpents, protective chalk, and magical wishes. However, since there is so much quasi-magical realism going on in the margins, none of the individual elements feels excessive or over-wrought. You will rarely hear this here, but this is a case where more was more.

Frankly, it is pretty amazing how much Lopez pulled off on a presumably limited budget. At times, it all looks too self-contained to the brain, as if five or six cartel death cultists massacred the tens of thousands of people living in Estrella’s demilitarized zone of a neighborhood. Yet, the limited and interconnected cast of characters definitely feels apiece with the fairy tale vibe.

Lopez also gets fantastic work out of her young ensemble. Paola Lara is rock solid as the smart but frighteningly vulnerable Estrella. However, the revelatory standout is Juan Ramon Lopez, who is so intense as Shine, it is downright spooky. The various abandoned buildings and scarred urban backdrops also give the film quite a bit of sinister character. The mere fact that Lope had so many such locations available to her is terrifying in its own right.

So, maybe with drug wars raging in Mexico, this isn’t such a great time to abolish ICE after all—or maybe we can just replace it with magic chalk and wishes. These are not idle musings. Despite the fantastical elements, there is an undeniable urgency to TANA. If you want to understand a country’s dark collective subconscious, look at their genre films. In this case, Lopez dares viewers to confront Mexico’s lost generation of drug war orphans and the highly uncertain future they share with the nation. Yet, we still connect with these kids on an emotional level. Highly recommended, Tigers Are Not Afraid screens tonight (8/26), as part of this year’s FrightFest UK.

FrightFest ’18: The Devil’s Doorway

The so-called Magdalene Laundries in Ireland have been the cause of so much suffering. For instance, they made the miserably mawkish film Philomena possible. They also provide a setting for satanic rituals in this period horror film, but let’s not get carried away with hyperbole. The black masses and possible sacrifice of the innocence are certainly bad, but they are not the affront to human decency that Philomena was. Of course, in 1960, Father Thomas Riley and his naïve assistant investigator Father John Thornton could not know that. Therefore, the infernal shenanigans they uncover will seem plenty horrifying in Aislinn Clarke’s The Devil’s Doorway (trailer here), which screens during this year’s FrightFest in the UK.

Father Thomas and Father John have been dispatched to this particularly dreary Magdalene convent to investigate claims of a Virgin Mary statue crying tears of blood. However, Father Thomas is convinced they are wasting their time, because these supposed miracles always turn out to be hoaxes. His name is Thomas—get it? He still goes through the motions, with the less skeptical younger priest duly filming every step, on grainy, era-appropriate 16mm.

As soon as they arrive, Father John starts hearing the eerie voices of children and catching glimpses of what seem to be apparitions out of the corner of his eye. Of course, Father Thomas does not want to hear about that sort of rot. He is too busy clashing with the sour-faced Mother Superior over her cruel treatment of the laundry women, but all bets are off when they discover a pregnant young woman chained up in the sub-basement displaying signs of physical abuse and demonic possession.

This movie is scary as all get out. Partly it is due to the oppressive grimness of the creaky Magdalene convent. The spookily evocative 16mm stock is also a factor. It really looks like it could be the remnant of something awfully sinister. However, the film’s unabashedly Catholic themes and demonic tropes really get at something buried deep within our collective Jungian subconscious. No matter what you believe, the Church is the primary bulwark against Hellfire falling from the sky, so when it is this corrupted by evil, we’re all screwed.

As an additional X-factor, veteran character actor Lalor Roddy might just give a career best performance as Father Thomas. It is an acutely human portrayal of man who is smart, vinegary, arrogant, and painfully self-aware of his own failings. If this performance were in “proper cinema,” people would be talking awards for Roddy, but alas, it comes in a found footage horror film, the lowest of the low. Helena Bereen also leaves an indelible mark as the despotic and despicable Mother Superior. When they go at it, it is like the verbal equivalent of bare-knuckles boxing.

Cinematographer Ryan Kernaghan, production designer John Leslie, and their minions all deserve enormous credit for the film’s eerie look and vibe. Granted, the logic of the found footage conceit breaks down here and there, but that is a common and relatively minor sin of the subgenre (probably just a few Hail Marys ought to cover it). Very highly recommended for fans of demonic horror and found footage, The Devil’s Doorway screens today (8/25) as part of this year’s FrightFest UK.

FrightFest ’18: Puppet Master—The Littlest Reich

They are vicious, homicidal National Socialist puppets, but at least they are not as annoying as the moralizing sock-puppets from Avenue Q. The killer puppets of Charles Band’s bread and butter franchise haven’t gone anywhere. In fact, they are now terrorizing full-size people in two separate cinematic worlds: Band’s continuing Puppet Master universe and the new licensed reboot (highly likely to generate sequels of its own). Everyone starts with a clean slate, but the little monsters and their nasty creator are just as evil as they ever were, maybe even more so, in Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund’s Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (trailer here), which screens during this year’s FrightFest in the UK.

In 1989, there was a notorious incident at the mansion of former Hitler confidant Andre Toulon, a master of mad science and the occult. Since then, his hand-crafted mail order puppets have become morbid collector’s items. Indie comic book artist Edgar Easton is considering auctioning off the puppet that once belonged to his brother—his late brother, who died under mysterious circumstances.

He had been deeply depressed by his recent divorce, especially since he was forced to move back in with his parents. However, his sudden romance with Ashley Summers, the little sister of a former classmate has drastically improved his outlook. She is such a good sport, she is oddly game to accompany him to the convention marking the 30^th anniversary of the Toulon Murders. Rather awkwardly, Easton’s obnoxious comic shop boss Markowitz invites himself along too, but he will be surprisingly handy to have around when things get crazy. In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea to collect so many Toulon puppets in one place.

At times, Littlest Reich is deliriously gory, seriously challenging the gleeful levels of mayhem in Band’s own films. Yet, S. Craig (Brawl in Cellblock 99) Zahler’s screenplay is surprisingly strong when it comes to characterization. Easton, Summers, and Markowitz are all quite sharp and funny. We actually root for them to live. Thomas Lennon and Jenny Pellicer have terrific bantering chemistry as Easton and Summers, while Nelson Franklin scores big laughs as Markowitz, before commandingly assuming the film’s heroic mantle.

Barbara Crampton also shows her under-appreciated comedic chops as Officer Carol Doreski, one of the original responding cops, who now gives lurid tours at the old Toulon house. Of course, Udo Kier does his thing as Toulon. Matthias Hues adds further cult weirdness playing a himbo hook-up, whose body is commandeered by the Toulon puppets.

As you probably figured out, Littlest Reich is not the subtlest film to come along. For instance, it literally ends with “To Be Continued” blazoned across the screen in big block letters (but there is also a short but amusing stinger at the very end). After the first rebooting, we’re already eager for more Puppet Mastery from Laguna, Wiklund, and Zahler. It is a fun film to watch on your own, but it should be an absolute blast at a festival setting. Highly recommended for fans of horror-comedies, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich screens twice tomorrow (8/24) as part of this year’s FrightFest UK—and finishes its New York run tonight (8/23) at the Village East.

FrightFest ’18: Lifechanger

Drew is sort of like a cross-between the alien in The Hidden and the legend of the Wandering Jew (in its more ideologically benign manifestations). To stay alive, he must hop from body to body, using up the vessel, but each time it tears up his soul a little more. He is looking for redemption, but he only seems to find more pain and produce ever higher body counts in Justin McConnell’s Lifechanger (trailer here), which screens during this year’s FrightFest in the UK.

When we first meet Drew, he is in a woman’s body, killing her nosy husband. Fortunately, he has years of experience disposing of bodies. He takes no sadistic pleasure from any of this—quite the contrary. It is simply a cold, hard question of survival. His host bodies expire quickly. He can slow down the decay process with antibiotics or speed it up with cocaine, but one way or another, he will be moving on soon.

The one constant is his eternal monologue, voiced by genre veteran Bill Oberst Jr. Outwardly, Drew will take the forms of men and women of varying ages, ethnicities, and socio-economic backgrounds. He also takes on all their baggage, most definitely starting with their personal relationships. For quite a while, the successive Drews have been trying to find a way to get close to a certain someone from a much early “lifechange.” As a result, there has been quite a bit of turnover in the patronage of her favorite neighborhood tavern.

In some ways, Lifechanger is a darker, deadlier cousin to the fantastical Korean romance, The Beauty Inside. Even though each thesp playing Drew is very different, the cumulative effect of their work is quite impressive. Obviously, McConnell also clearly deserves credit for being an actor’s genre film director. He manages to keep everyone in the battery of Drews mentally and emotionally compatible, while maintaining the sad but sinister vibe.

Arguably, Lifechanger could just as easily be categorized as a thriller or a dark urban fantasy, but it probably makes sense to call it horror, because fans of the genre are probably the most receptive to something a little off-center and hard to classify. There are certainly enough dead bodies to hang with the horror crowd, plus karma is mean as a snake.

There is no weak link in the chain of Drews, but Rachel VanDuzer and Jack Foley definitely stand out, because they get the baton at key dramatic moments. As a result, they both really bring out the sad, acutely human Larry Talbot side of Drew.

In many ways, Lifechanger reconnects with the more empathetic horror tradition of interpreting monsters as tragic, lonely figures alienated from society (the Wolfman, the Invisible Man, etc.). It is smart, mature genre filmmaking, with very little special effects (unless you count the decent supply of blood). Very highly recommended, Lifechanger screens this Friday (8/24) and Sunday (8/26) as part of this year’s FrightFest UK.