By: Henry J. Fromage –
Okay, fine, I finally gave in and binged the Terrifier trilogy this week. I guess it’s Spooky Season, so why not?
587. Terrifier
While can appreciate a good practical gore effect as much as the next guy and can get down with some pitch black humor more than most (a viscera-covered mime may be the picture in the dictionary next to “pitch black humor”), it was actually other aspects of the first in this unlikeliest of franchises I appreciated most (and no, it was not the unrelenting sadism). There’s a real Video Nasty cheapo 80s slasher aesthetic to everything that both fits the budget like a glove and clearly comes from a deep love for the genre. It’s replete with rough edges, but that’s kind of the point. Three Beers.
588. Terrifier 2
What a leap! Damien Leone takes what probably wasn’t a ton more money and topped his original in every way. The aesthetic here is now elevated 80s slasher fare- think a Nightmare on Elm Street sequel- but he still indulges in the old ultra-violence and sheer gleeful depravity of David Howard Thornton’s Art the Clown, now with a fitting foe in Lauren LaVera’s teenage chosen one (complete with Heavy Metal getup). There odd slightly over the top performance here or there doesn’t dampen one of the more accomplished horror films in recent times. Two Beers.
589. Terrifier 3
I loved the second bout with Art, so it was perhaps inevitable that I would be a bit let down by this one, since I can’t imagine what a similar leap in quality between installments could have yielded. That being said, Art’s sheer delight at everything Santa Claus, and the horrific Saint Nick-themed escapades that engenders, makes for the particular kind of good time this franchise has to offer. LaVera is also great as the increasingly haunted final girl. Three Beers.
590. Hollywoodgate
Egyptian filmmaker Ibrahim Nash’at took his camera somewhere almost assuredly far more dangerous than the surprising amount of folks who’ve managed to smuggle footage out of North Korea- Afghanistan, almost directly on the hells of the last U.S. soldiers. He’s given permission to follow a unit that seeks to take all of the to various degrees sabotaged equipment they left behind and contribute to what passes for a Taliban Air Force. The footage here is incredible, both in what is allowed to be shown and not, as we take a peek into a formation of a new repressive regime that hopefully will not become another North Korea, even though it certainly appears to have the will, and now the equipment, to. Two Beers.
591. ME
Apparently Don Hertzfeldt originally set out to collaborate with a famous band that may or may not have been Arcade Fire on a project, only to have that fall apart and stick him with a musical animated film that suddenly had no music. Frankly, that’s probably for the best since the mix of energetic drum score, classical music, and the dialogue-free film mesh beautifully. As always, his mix of simplistic animation and high concept sci-fi meaning of life subject matter proves far more poignant and thought-provoking than you’d ever expect. Two Beers.
592. Daaaaaalí!
Quentin Dupieux is our foremost purveyor of cinematic absurdity, and no stranger to leveraging surrealism for its maximum comic potential. So, when I saw his newest project was about Salvador Dali, I couldn’t imagine a more perfect fit- and I’m happy to report I wasn’t wrong. Just follow this where it goes and it’ll all make its own kind of delightfully nonsensical sense. Two Beers.
593. In Her Place
Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi makes the jump from acclaimed documentaries into non-fiction with this historical fiction about a court stenographer who becomes obsessed with a beautiful and glamorous murderess (based on a real-life case), perhaps thinking her life (and apartment, which she gets a key to for official business and secretly keeps) has everything her comparatively plain one does not. This is an easy movie to appreciate intellectually, but harder one to empathize with its characters and the choices they make. Three Beers.
