Cold War (Poland/France/UK 2018: Dir Pavel Pawlikowski)

At first glance the sheer sweep of Pavel Pawlikowski's latest film will perhaps come as a surprise to people used to his more contained dramas like Ida (2013) or My Summer of Love (2004). But despite its multi country setting, the stunning musical elements and the decade plus timespan, this is still essentially an intimate film about two people who can't live with or without each other.

Pawlikowski has dedicated the film to his parents, whose stormy but loving relationship inspired Cold War's principal characters, musician Wiktor and singer Zula, brilliantly played respectively by a taciturn Tomasz Kot and a willful but tragic Joanna Kulig.

When we first meet them the setting is 1949 Poland; Wiktor and his then partner Irena travel round the country 'field recording' folk singers in towns and villages, looking for the strongest artists who will be enrolled in a project to keep Poland's song traditions alive with a massive concert. Among the singers chosen is Zula, who comes complete with a fraught past (involving attacking - and possibly killing - her father in self defense after a rape attempt) and gritty determination; she cajoles a fellow singer to audition for Wiktor as a duet, firmly in the knowledge that hers will be the most noticeable voice.   

And it works - Zula is asked to sing something else, and chooses, not entirely artlessly, a song from a Russian movie - Wiktor is hooked. Zula and Wiktor's attraction is instant but whereas he seems blindly besotted she clearly has a calculated agenda to leave Poland by any means possible. This attraction - and Zula's betrayal of her new lover - leads to Wiktor also having to leave, eventually travelling to Paris where his musical talents are diluted, first as jazz pianist and then a film composer. Over the course of the film the pair, who unsatisfyingly partner with other people, meet, couple, fight and separate over the course of the next ten years, before finally and tragically reuniting in Poland.

In Cold War (a rather obvious play on words title here) there are two love affairs going on. Obviously one is between Zula and Wiktor, but the other is with Poland itself. It is a country torn between its traditions and uneasy seduction by Soviet rule. A moving scene illustrates this perfectly, where the folk orchestra and choir, persuaded to trade in their traditional songs for rousing pro Russian pieces, perform on stage, dwarfed by the unfurling of a huge flag of Stalin, hand cranked by a stage flunky. 

The pull of Poland is strong for Zula and particularly Wiktor, and both both the couple's lives unravel slowly after leaving their home land - it's difficult to know how much of this is down to their tempestuous relationship or the uprooting from everything they knew? Wiktor lives in Paris in a loveless relationship with a poetess, Juliette, both openly sharing their lives with others, their despair captured by small brushstrokes of dialogue (Juliette: "Have you been out whoring?" Wiktor: "No, I've been with the woman of my life."). Zula meanwhile is being slowly turned into a star, reluctantly moulded into something she is not - a sultry torch singer singing "stupid lyrics" penned by Juliette. When Zula and Wiktor make an album together, and after he presents the finished work to her, describing it as their "first child," she tosses it in a bin calling it "a bastard."

The word bittersweet is terribly overused but in the case of Cold War very fitting. Zula and Wiktor's relationship is passionate but fractured - more joy is seen in the set piece song and dance numbers than on either of their faces, but the whole film is brilliantly and almost magically brought to life through the lavish black and white photography of Lukasz Zal, using the academy ratio with stunning effect. While you're never quite sure how much you can warm to their relationship (at one point Zula sums it up by saying "I love him and that's that") there's no denying the final reel emotional pull, where the formerly exiled lovers are reunited in Poland, having paid the ultimate price for their togetherness.

Dark Eyes Retrovision #1 - Miss Leslie's Dolls (USA 1973 - Dir Joseph G. Prieto)

We're gonna go back...right back etc etc for a new strand on my blog.

Once upon a time if you wanted to see movies broadly classified as 'lost grindhouse classics' you'd be looking to US labels like 'Something Weird Video' for your visual fix. Well those times have definitely changed, and now here's the respectable but always reliable UK company, Network, bringing us a shiny new Blu Ray of the oft talked about, rarely seen Miss Leslie's Dolls, a copy of which finally resurfaced at the end of the previous decade.

Miami dwelling Cuban born Prieto's directing history between 1951 and 1973 brought us just five films, although he may also have been known as Joseph Mawra, the guy that gave the world the infamous Olga movies of the 1960s (in a recent interview he claimed to have had nothing to do with Miss Leslie's Dolls, so the jury seems to still be out as to whether they're one and the same person). I confess that apart from this one I have only seen Prieto's second movie, 1967's Shanty Tramp, curated by Nicolas Winding Refn for the MUBI channel a while back. Shanty Tramp, for all its Meyeresque touches, is an essentially moral and rather bleak tale of one woman's impact on a small town, and something of that bleakness survives in MLD, sadly Prieto's last film as director.

Alma Frost, teacher at a Boston University, is far from home in a car with three of her students (actually the movie was shot in Florida, so they're a long way from home). When the car breaks down in the middle of a storm, they find shelter in a house, which turns out to be the home of Miss Leslie. Now from the outset it's clear that 'Miss' Leslie is probably a Mister with a wig and dress - having 'her' voice dubbed by a woman just makes things more confusing. Turns out that Miss Leslie has a basement full of dolls that have been created from live people - an old plot device borrowed from 1933's Mystery of the Wax Museum and even Carry on Screaming (1966). The householder's wild look recalls that most famous cinematic cross dresser, Norman Bates, and indeed Miss Leslie has the preserved skull of her mother to talk to, conversations which reveal that her real aim in ensnaring the young people is to kill and be reborn through one of them, discarding her old body and choosing a considerably newer version. But Miss Leslie is a bit of a rubbish necromancer, and before you know it there are bodies everywhere, and our psychopath sets her sights on Miss Frost, the formerly buttoned up teacher whose sapphic urges have been released after her coffee is spiked.

Depending on your appetite for grindhouse schlock, this is either a really tiresome picture or a big curio. I am of course in the latter camp, and MLD is a blast, despite its initially rather torpid pace. Lighter on softcore content than I was expecting, it gets by on its sheer chicken orientalness. Central to this is the Cuban writer and actor Salvador Ugarte as Miss Leslie, as demented a performance as you are ever likely to see. Ugarte's only screen role, I'm guessing he was borderline unemployable after this one. With his strange monologues and totally committed performance you can't take your eyes off him. None of the rest of the 'actors' command anything like this level of interest - there's a lot of standing around - but with Ugarte in nearly every scene, who cares?

Network's release is based on original film elements and is probably better than it ever looked on the big screen. Disc extras are scant (a photo gallery) but there's an accompanying booklet on the film by Dr Laura Mayne. It'll be released, to the delight of degenerate grindhouse fans everywhere, on Blu Ray/DVD from 3 September 2018, and digitally from 1 October 2018.

The Incantation (USA 2018: Dir Jude S Walko)

Jude S. Walko’s debut feature, about a young American girl summoned to an ancient castle, the home of her ancestors, is best seen as a modern update of a gothic fairy tale.

Happy go lucky Lucy is sent to northern France to attend the funeral of a distant relative; when she arrives she meets the rather loquacious Vicar of Borley (Walko) and a starchy housekeeper, and gets a brusque welcome from both – stick to the lower floors, no guests, that kind of thing. The arrival of a local insurance salesman, who may know more than he’s letting on, completes the weird household.

Gradually Lucy’s happy selfie-based demeanour is knocked out of her by a deepening gloom in her new home; a strange little girl is seen in the woods, who may or may not be a ghost; and, while ignoring the house rules and exploring upstairs, she finds evidence that the castle had previously been used in ritual magic – even uncovering a book of witchcraft practices, the Sorteligia (sorry, that death metal band name's already been taken).

Pudgy Jean- Pierre, the local gravedigger, seems to be her only friend, but Lucy begins to feel more and more a prisoner; and when she loses her way home one evening, after getting drunk in a bar, she encounters a strange blind woman occupying a seemingly abandoned cottage (who in the end credits is described rather wonderfully as 'Ethereal Crone' - now that's a death metal band name if ever I heard one!), who warns Lucy of her fate. "I don't plan on dying anytime soon," Lucy reasons, but it seems that the house's occupants have other ideas.

Now this movie really shouldn’t work – apart from a couple of profanities, it’s strictly Sunday teatime stuff. The acting is rather pedestrian, and the whole thing seems terribly naïve. But therein lies its success. It’s totally out of step with most modern horror/supernatural films. It’s languid, beautifully filmed and very quaintly old fashioned. It takes quite a leap of faith to like it but like it I did – and a lot of its success is down to Sam Valentine as Lucy who does a really good job and carried the whole movie. Admittedly Dean Cain as Abel Baddon, the insurance guy (yes that Dean Cain) looks bemused throughout, but at least he got an all-expenses paid holiday to France.

Penny Slinger: Out of the Shadows (UK 2017: Dir Richard Kovitch)

The success of any documentary about living artists is very much dependent on the subject; writing about art documentaries even more so because of the lack of available visual context in a review.

Thankfully Richard Kovitch's documentary about 'missing' British artist Penny Slinger has the advantage of the subject eloquently and extensively narrating her story, sharing ideas about her art and the times she has lived through.

Slinger isn't missing at all - her light burnt brightly in British art circles, particuarly the decade from 1967 to 1977, but she chose to absent herself from the UK, now living a seemingly idyllic life in California, without the need to explain herself and her work.

But Kovitch's film concentrates on the first thirty odd (and sometimes very odd) years of her life, from her errant schoolgirl life in south London to her development as an artist at London's Chelsea College of Arts and later the Royal College of Art. The documentary captures an artist arriving, if not fully formed, but with a clear idea of what she wanted to convey, if not necessarily the medium in which she wanted to convey it; anything from collages, sculptures and even taxidermy. Ironically Slinger was warned off pursuing collage as a means of artistic expression - the late 1960s being all done with the (male) surrealists who championed this approach - but ultimately it is this medium that has produced her most defining work.

One of the difficulties in describing a very different time (ie the late 1960s/early 1970s) - and particularly the position of women in art during this period - is in understanding just how difficult it must have been for a female artist to achieve her vision. The suggestion that as a woman Slinger should naturally be someone's muse ("I wanted to be my own muse," she says at one point) came to a head in her relationship with Peter Whitehead, and it's here that the documentary gains real interest, and departs from the danger of simply being a narrated list of names and dates.

Their relationship began in 1969 with Whitehead whisking her off to the sprawling pile in which he was living, Lilford Hall in Northamptonshire. It was clearly a complicated one, not without love, and which left a lasting impression on Slinger. In the documentary Whitehead seems to take a practical approach to the relationship, seeing the artist and her work as a curated project (even filming them both for an abandoned movie); for Slinger, her reaction to Whitehead and indeed the derelict house in which she was living was more profound and resonant, resulting in the extended collages that made up the sprawling 'An Exorcism' work, utilising Whitehead and her close friend Suzanka Fraey. Slinger used the house as an extended metaphor for her own body, and the images comprising this work, sympathetically soundtracked by Psychological Strategy Board's analogue rumblings, are fantastic and still surprising examples of, as one critic puts it, "when Englishness goes weird."

It's difficult to know to what extent Slinger's reaction to Lilford Hall and the Whitehead years was a response to living with the artist or to the wider issues of the status of women in art generally. As Slinger says "the personal is political," and her subsequent filmed work with the late Jane Arden, who was a major influence in helping her expand her artistic ideas, demonstrates the extent to which she initially embraced the director's radical feminist agenda, then walked away, finding its constraints limiting.

While Out of the Shadows is successful is conveying the reality of the artistic struggle during this period, with the exception of Slinger the talking heads providing the context are rather austere and distant, treating the artist more like a delicate museum piece than a living breathing person. The latter sections of the documentary work best, but what stands out clearly overall is Slinger's work, still challenging now, and her striking use of varied and contrasting images and forms. The artist's composed presence on screen, serene and always faintly smiling, belies the devoted and radical artist within, but I'd like to have seen less reserve and more excitement in celebrating her diverse and stimulating output.     

Supermarket Sweep #2 - Reviews of Beyond the Woods (Ireland 2018), Anna (USA 2017), The House on Elm Lake (UK 2017), Straight From Hell (USA 2017), Carnivore: Werewolf of London (UK 2017) and American Bigfoot (USA 2017)

Beyond the Woods (Ireland 2018: Dir Sean Breathnach) Writer/producer/editor/director/special
effects/sound designer Breatnach's first feature - a 2016 movie dressed up as a new release - is an hour of people bickering and fifteen minutes of inexplicable horror featuring a rags wearing demon and some half hearted possessed people.

Honestly this movie runs for an hour and a quarter and took me two goes to get through it. A group of twentysomethings rendezvous at the Irish country house of Emma. Drinks are drunk. A illicit threesome is entered into. People feel guilty. More drinking occurs. A nearby sinkhole has opened up (from which the guy in rags eventually emerges) which gets smellier and smellier. Someone tries to escape by driving off but ends up where she started from.

Turns out the guy in rags is a soul collecting demon and the occupants of the cottage fulfil that requirement, courtesy of the axe that he wields. There's a nice scene towards the end where the final girl, Lucy, does a bit of a deal to escape, which is then ruined by an off screen sound effect. This is a really dumb, tedious film and everyone involved in it should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. I did love the imdb reviewer who wrote 'Sky TV had this down as 5/5, they need poking in the bloody eye.' Quite.

Anna (USA 2017: Dir Michael Crum) Ah a horror comedy about a possessed doll. Which is occasionally (shock) quite funny. Crum casts himself as Shawn, who along with his mate Jacob are a pair of paranormal investigating doofuses (doofi?). Together they hear about a doll, currently resident in a paranormal museum, who has the power to pull the soul of any person coming into contact with it into hell. Shawn and Jacob steal the doll from the museum and take it back to their shitty apartment, where after sacrificing a prostitute - accidentally - and courtesy of a local witch, the doll starts to do her stuff.

At over an hour and a half long this feels very drawn out and has all kinds of pacing issues. Plus it sounds like it was recorded on a dictaphone. Things hot up briefly at the hour point, with some nice jump scares after the witch becomes possessed by the doll, effects clearly referring to The Thing. Shawn and Jacob are likeable idiots, and their larking about raises a few laughs, even if they do overplay the dumb and dumber hand a bit. But the whole thing needed to be a bit less amateurish and much more tightly edited to hold the attention. And let's face it, dolls just aren't scary. No, they're REALLY not.

The House on Elm Lake (UK 2017: Dir James Klass) Well done to the makers of this movie for actually finding a house by the lake in the UK - not a typical model for bricks and mortar building in this country - as the setting for this cheap and occasionally rather nasty riff on Amityville 2: The Possession. Houses by lakes are ten a cent in the US of course, and the waterside setting, redolent of many low budget American horror movies, suggests a desire to reap some income Stateside.

But quite what US audiences will make of this is anyone's business - it's overlong, very slow and very, very unscary. The House on Elm Lake is the story of a husband and wife, who, with their young daughter, rent a waterside retreat to make a new start in life, only to fall foul of a murderous presence in the house which has driven previous occupants to murder and suicide. This is actually a remake of a 2014 movie, Lucifer's Night, directed by one Henry W. Smith, who is also Second AD on this film. And the connections continue: The House on Elm Lake actually 'stars' a number of people who were in Smith's movie as the same characters, namely mum Hayley (Becca Hirani), daughter Penny (Faye Goodwin) and several of the ghosts. Lucifer's Night seems never to have received a home release - but we have the 2017 version at least.

Hirani (or Fletcher as she's sometimes known) is becoming something of a micro budget exploitation movie queen, having been in a few things last year: director James Klass's other horror film (12 Deaths of Christmas aka Mother Krampus); a 50 Shades ripoff called Darker Shades of Elise; and a remake of the 1982 video nasty Unhinged. While it's good to see this kind of home grown talent being nurtured, Ms Hirani and her chums in the film are no great shakes at the old acting, and the effects, although avoiding the CGI route, and fairly feeble. There are one or two scenes involving half glimpsed figures that work reasonably well, but, well, it's just not very good.

Straight From Hell (USA 2017: Dir Ryan Brookheart) Despite the 2017 packaging, this is actually a 2015 movie originally titled Trace. It's a surprisingly competent if desperately unoriginal piece, but as a first feature it's very watchable, not least because of the easy on the eye twentysomething cast; when we first meet them are shooting the breeze and drinking together, eventually arriving at that staple of dinner party conversation, EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon).

The group are the usual bunch of those up for it and those not, but nominal leader of the pack Nick leads everyone down to his basement recording studio, where he's been studying EVP, to invite them to a 21st century version of a good old fashioned seance. Before you know it, the group have summoned an invisible demon called Abigor, who tells then (via subliminal messages on tape) that he's going to pick the group off one by one, to enable him to rejoin the living.

The movie scores points for largely confining itself to closed spaces and for maintaining some tension as the members of the group die off. The critic who described it as 'goretastic!' must have been watching a different movie, but it's reasonably creepy in places, and refreshingly doesn't spend too much time on the demonic backstory. Generic but not unappealing.

Carnivore: Werewolf of London (UK 2017: Dir Simon Wells) At a future point some intrepid writer - maybe me, who knows? - will do some research on UK holiday cottage rentals used in low budget horror films, allowing the public the opportunity to walk in the steps of minor actors in search of a unique location experience - I can see a map with bloodspatters for 'X marks the spot' now. Simon Wells seems justifiably proud of having picked his woodland spot for Carnivore: Werewolf of London (although judging by the accent of the guy who looks after the cottage we are indeed some way from the big smoke), in that 80% of the scenes take place within the cottage's ultra modern interiors.

We're in the company of Dave and his young girlfriend Abi, away for a dirty weekend. Abi is American (I think; somebody called Atlanta Johnson who is a Brit and did not, I assume, have a US voice coach) and Dave is, well, a bit angry (a slightly Jason Statham like Ben Lloyd-Holmes). So the clothes come off and go back on again in a series of intimate moments that are probably more uncomfortable for the audience than the actors taking part. But someone (or something)'s watching them from outside the cottage and wants to get in, as Dave and Abi fight for their lives against the unseen menace.

Except very soon the menace makes itself very visible and is just a guy in a werewolf suit, a werewolf that is both pretty resourceless and gets turned on by watching outdoor sex. The werewolf is, pardon the phrase, seriously overexposed and less would most definitely have been more in terms of the creature effects. I'm going to guess that with the odd one liner and hokey situations the director doesn't want us to take this too seriously. But any attempt at a horror comedy falls flat; Johnson and Lloyd-Holmes aren't great at building tension and are saddled with a fairly terrible script. The reveal of the origin of the werewolf is delivered so slowly that I'm sure 90% of the viewing audience will have shouted it back at the screen before the truth is uttered. And as for the shameless nod to a much better werewolf movie in the title - well London location spotters, be prepared to go elsewhere, because the Capital is only briefly glimpsed in the movie. Next!

American Bigfoot aka Kampout (USA 2017: Dir Glenn Martin) According to imdb director Glenn Martin brought out a director's cut of this movie the year before Kampout was released (and for once the retitling of the film actually makes sense - Kampout?). Heaven forbid that it should have been any longer than the lumbering hour and a half of this mess.

Martin really doesn't know what he's trying to do here. It's ostensibly a Sasquatch comedy with added gore and lots of local 'colour' - all filmed in and around Nelsonville, Ohio, utilising real locations and even a bit of actual history; one of the movie's down on their luck characters owes his penury to the closure of the town's coal mines. It's possible that local people were recruited for some of the cast, as aside from the actors who one recognises (Zach Gremlins Gilligan and Clint Evilspeak Howard) pretty much everyone else is a dud in the acting department.

The story - a bigfoot family loses baby bigfoot when it's shot and decides to go on a murderous rampage - seems to get lost within the director's admittedly sincere wish to establish character, and as such there's a lot of pretty meaningless dialogue which all goes nowhere fast. So while there's nothing really wrong with American Bigfoot - it's quite well put together and the Ohio countryside looks beautiful - the Sasquatch costumes are awful, the comedy fails to deliver for the most part, and it has an open ended conclusion which is pitiful rather than thought provoking. It's just a very unnecessary film, but hey, you pays your £3, you takes your chance.