Horror Film Review: All You Need Is Death (dir by Paul Duane)

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Folk music is the music of evil people.

That’s something that I’ve been saying for years. Of course, as is usually the case with such pronouncements, I was only being half-serious when I originally said it. The first time I said it, it was to an older relative who had just forced me to sit through a 20 minute performance of I’ll Fly Away. The second time I said it, it was to a friend who was really into Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and all those commies After that, I found many excuses to say it because I was going to college that was renowned for its music program. It was one of those colleges where you couldn’t turn a corner without potentially running into someone who was taking a class in folk music. They were always a bit annoying. For folkies, it wasn’t enough to tell you that their music was better than your music. They also had to tell you why listening to the Weavers on scratchy vinyl made them better human beings than you.

That said, I was never totally serious about folk music being the music of evil people. That seemed like a far more appropriate thing to say about prog rock. But, having watched All You Need Is Death, I’m now not so sure. Folk music may very well be evil.

All You Need Is Death tells the story of Anna (Simone Collins) and Aleks (Charlie Maher), a couple who live in Dublin. Anna is a gifted singer and, when we first see the two of them, Anna and Aleks appear to be deeply in love. They work for an academic named Agnes (Catherine Siggins), whose goal is to find the oldest known versions of various folk songs. Their work brings them to an apparently demented old woman named Rita (Olwen Fouere), who is rumored to know a song that is in a language the predates the Irish language. Rita reveals that she does indeed know the song, which was apparently inspired by a romantic betrayal and a brutal death. She explains that the song has been passed down from one woman to another over the centuries. It can never be recorded and men are not allowed to hear the song. After Aleks excuses himself, Rita sings the song to Anna. As they drive back home, Anna tries to sing the song from memory but struggles, which isn’t surprising considering that the song isn’t even in a living language. However, they’re stopped by Agnes who reveals that she secretly recorded Rita singing. Meanwhile, Rita is herself gruesomely murdered by a mysterious force.

Things get progressively stranger from there, as Anna finds herself being targeted by Rita’s unhinged son (Nigel O’Neill) and Anna and Alek’s previously blessed relationship suddenly seems to be cursed. There’s even a touch of Cronenbergian body horror as the film plays out. The film’s plot is not always easy to follow and that’s not a bad thing. This is one of those horror films that works because the audience never feels quite secure in their understanding of what they’re seeing. The story plays out at its own pace, putting an emphasis on atmosphere over easy shocks and jump scares. It’s about as close to a filmed dream as the viewer is likely to find. It’s a horror film that sticks with you after the end credits role. You’ll never listen to another folk song.

Horror Film Review: Cult Killer (dir by Jon Keeyes)

Posted on October 8, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

What a stupid movie!

Released earlier this year, Cult Killer stars Alice Eve as Cassie Holt, a former librarian who is now a private investigator in Ireland. Cassie has a tragic backstory, which we hear about from several people along with hearing about it from Cassie and then getting to see most of what we’ve already heard about in a series of flashbacks. Cassie was sexually abused by her grandfather, dropped out of university, learned Brazilian ju-jitsu, became an alcoholic, went to AA, and is now a private investigator.

Her mentor is Mikael Tallini (Antonio Banderas, looking embarrassed). When Mikael is murdered by a woman who pounces on him and then steps him to death, Cassie sets out to solve his murder and get revenge. She discovers that her sleepy Irish village is actually the home of a cult of sex abusers and Jamie Douglas (Shelley Hening) has been killing everyone who either abused or betrayed her, though Mikael apparently was just killed because he had been hired to find out what she was doing. Soon, Jamie is calling Cassie on the phone and telling her about all the details of her crimes, encouraging Cassie to help her while also acknowledging that Cassie will eventually have to arrest her or kill her or do something to avenge the death of her mentor at Jamie’s hands. “We not do different, you and I,” Jamie says without a hint of irony.

Antonio Banderas gets top-billing in Cult Killer and he’s prominently featured on the film’s poster. His character is killed off after the first ten minutes but he then reappears in flashbacks as Cassie remembers him training her and all the times that she told him about her tragic backstory. There’s a lot of flashbacks in Cult Killer and they don’t exactly show up at the most logical of moments. They’re rather randomly sprinkled throughout the film and often, there’s no real indication that we’ve entered flashback territory until Banderas shows up. I know and understand that it’s currently totally melvin to tell a story in chronological order. Everyone wants to be Christopher Nolan. But the thing is, Christopher Nolan is a genius. Most directors are not. The director of Cult Killer is not.

Along with the jumbled timeline, the other big problem with this film is that Shelley Hening’s performance as Jamie is absolutely atrocious. Some of it is the script, which forces all of its worst lines onto Jamie. But, beyond that, Hening plays Jamie as being a somewhat mischevious brat while the film needs her to be a charismatic maniac. Throwing a skull into a room and then calling Cassie to tell her that you just did some “Monster shit,” doesn’t make you into an intriguing anti-hero or a compelling villain. It just makes you into the equivalent of a pre-teen tossing eggs at the house of a hated teacher and then bragging about it the next day. Jamie’s relationship with Cassie never rings true and neither Eve nor Hening really seem to have much idea what’s going on with their characters either. It takes a lot of effort to make two sex abuse survivors come across as being incredibly annoying but this film manages to do it.

The film features Jamie targeting the members of a cult of wealthy sex abusers. That story had potential, especially when you consider that Epstein didn’t kill himself. But the film gets so bogged down in flashbacks that it never creates a proper feeling of paranoia or, for that matter, any narrative momentum. It all just feels rather pointless and confused, as if the film itself isn’t quite sure what it’s trying to say. The best film to be inspired by the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein remains The Scary of Sixty-First.

The Films of 2024: Sunrise (dir by Andrew Baird)

Posted on May 20, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the Pacific Northwest, animals are being killed and their blood is being drained. Some of the locals theorize that it’s the work of the Red Coat, a legendary creature that demands constant sacrifices to keep it at bay.

Reynolds (Guy Pearce, with a wild preacherman beard) doesn’t care about the Red Coat. He’s more upset about the fact that he and his buddies are feeling displaced in America. He’s been driven to rage by the fact that there’s a family named Loi living in his community. He hates immigrants. He blames minorities for every problem that America is facing. He says “ain’t” instead of “is not” because that’s the way this film lets us know that its characters are supposed to be blue collar.

Reynolds has murdered Mr. Loi (Chike Chin) and he’s targeting Yan Loi (Crystal Yu) and her teenage son, Edward (William Gao). Fortunately, the Loi Family has a protector. Fallon (Alex Pettyfer) wanders through the misty countryside with a grim look on his face and a darkly-colored wardrobe that is designed to let us know that he’s seeking vengeance. Along with defending the Loi Family, Fallon has a personal reason for seeking vengeance on Reynolds. Fallon also has an insatiable need for blood….

Sunrise is a somber, slowly-paced, and rather shallow-minded film. It takes itself very seriously and it definitely wants you to know that it has important stuff on its mind, unlike those other vampire films that just seek to be entertaining. Of course, as any student of the grindhouse knows, an entertaining film can often be the most effective form of propaganda around. People aren’t going to think about your message is they’re bored out of their mind.

At times, Sunrise seems to think that it’s the first film to ever use vampirism as a way to comment on current events, which I’m sure would be news to Bram Stoker, Jean Rollin, Anne Rice, Stephen King, Kim Newman, John Carpenter, Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola, Spike Lee, Abel Ferrara, Guillermo del Toro, Kathyrn Bigelow, David Conenberg, Bill Gunn, Dan Curtis, and just about anyone else who has ever written or directed anything that involved a vampire. Reynolds rants and rave about his hated of immigrants in speeches that are so overwritten and so florid that they verge on parody. (At one point, he saps at a deputy for not drinking an American beer.) His character is a fever dream of what Leftists think blue collar workers sound like when they’re not cheering their favorite football team or laughing about climate change. I suppose the filmmakers deserve some credit for having enough discipline to realize that having Reynolds shout, “This is MAGA country!” would be a bit too heavy-handed for even this film but one can tell that the temptation was definitely there.

At first, I thought that the film’s cinematography would be its saving grace but eventually, I got bored with all of the artfully composed shots of the misty northwest. There’s really not much difference between Sunrise‘s visuals and the visuals of the Twilight films. Then I thought that Guy Pearce’s intensity might elevate the film but then I realized that Pearce has played this same character several times and he’s been more interesting in other films. As for Alex Pettyfer, he’s just as boring here as he was in Magic Mike. In Magic Mike, he at least danced.

Interestingly, this film — with its portrayal of rampant racism in the American northwest — is an Irish production that was shot not in Washington or Oregon but instead in Belfast. That perhaps explains why the characters often sound like they learned how to speak by watching American cop shows on television. Personally, I am not amongst those who feels that people should only be allowed to make movies about their own countries. I don’t believe in limiting the imagination in that style. As an American of Irish (and Italian and Spanish) descent, I think that an American filmmaker would be totally justified in directing a film about Ian Paisley’s followers terrorizing the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. (They could even shoot it around Austin, Texas.) Or maybe someone could make a movie about that Irish basketball team who refused to shake hands with an opposing team because the team was from Israel. All’s fair.