Zama

Zama (2018)

Dir. and written by Lucrecia Martel

Based on Zama by Antonio di Benedetto

Starring Daniel Giménez Cacho, Lola Dueñas, Matheus Nachtergaele, Juan Minujín

ZAMA is a curious, quiet little period piece which is so subtle and unpushy that I didn't entirely realize it was a comedy until maybe halfway through, and didn't realize it was a horror movie for a while longer, though in retrospect it's very much both, albeit in the most dry, deadpan, and existential iterations of those two genres possible. It's the story --or, perhaps, the anti-story-- of Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho, CRONOS and WE ARE WHAT WE ARE, beyond perfection in a role which requires him to paradoxically overwhelm the audience by underplaying everything), a minor Spanish official in colonial-era Paraguay, desperate to be transferred out of this rural backwater, but miserable enough to be unable to avoid self-sabotage before that can happen.

The primary tone, then, is one of crushing stagnation, the slow-motion horror of being gradually buried alive in a thousand tiny setbacks. For the longest time, the movie is basically the DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOIS set in 18th century Paraguay, with Zama's many pathetic attempts to escape his miserable purgatory perpetually offering a brief flicker of hope before leaving him even worse-off than he was before, his stockpile of hope emptied just a little further. The movie wavers close to out-and-out absurdism in the litany of indignities it lavishes on its milquetoast protagonist, piling up his woes so gradually that they barely register until they reach critical mass. Gradually, though, the comic insults begin to add up in wilder and wilder ways (he's forced to move into a haunted hotel at one point!) while the style of the film remains as blithely reserved as ever, resulting in a disconnect which is at once very funny and quite existentially disturbing. The sense of escalation is gradual, but as irresistible and flattening as a glacier, and by the film's end things begin to spiral out of control in increasingly blunt, visceral ways. Indeed, the final section (the film, reflecting the apparently excellent 1956 novel it adapts, is really three mostly self-contained chapters) suddenly plunges into a vivid, desperate jungle nightmare that I'm required by law and tradition to compare to AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD, finally paying off the first two acts' gradually escalating sense of human-crushing chaos while losing none of the film's quiet potency.

All throughout, director Lucretia Martel (LA CIENAGA, THE HEADLESS WOMAN) maintains a disinterested reserve, as though the camera barely finds Zama interesting enough to bother following him, instead peering curiously around its protagonist into the world of colonialist horrors barely noticed by him, but which can hardly fail to disturb a modern viewer (most notably the ubiquitous enslaved native Paraguayans, who the story and characters completely ignore but the camera finds pointedly relevant). Zama, who can't even control his life, barely manages to stay at the center of his own story, with Martel's unfussy deep focus shots and vivid evocation of a bygone world (which is, perhaps, not so alien to our own as we would like to believe; note the thoroughly modern musical choices) filling in the ellipses of the go-nowhere narrative with a rich, endlessly fascinating tableau of life.

Martel has made only three other movies, all of which seem to be highly esteemed, but none of which I’ve ever seen. They’re definitely on the list now, though; I mean look at this lady. I like her style:

A little research suggests that she’s most known for her caustic, deadpan satire at the expense of her native Argentina’s bourgeois upper class, and you could certainly read something of that into ZAMA, if you were so inclined. There’s something very revealing about the film’s ostensible focus on Zama’s stagnating ennui in the face of the shocking brutality going on all around him. He’s a laughingstock, yes; but our chuckles at his expense catch in our throat when we see the horrors of the system this man is casually supporting. That he is completely and utterly ambivalent to that system pushes the discomfort even further; it would be appalling but comfortingly comprehensible if he were a fervent believer, but to see such a vacuous, indifferent man perpetrate such horrors with halfhearted disinterest is singularly chilling… and easy to relate to. Zama isn’t an actively cruel man; he’s too consumed by bored self-pity to take sadistic pleasure in having slaves whipped or natives executed. Instead he barely even notices. The savagery he’s taking part in doesn’t even register in the face of his all-consuming moping. And are we really so different? The period setting merely allows Martel to quietly push the audience to notice the cruelty of a system that daily life inures us to. If Zama were a modern-day bureaucrat disinterestedly crushing the poor and vulnerable with the faceless, impersonal power of the state, we probably wouldn’t even notice it. We’d take at face value that his wounded self-esteem really is what the movie finds interesting. Because he would look like us. 

 Anyway, my real point here is that the movie contains some of the best damn llama acting I've ever seen in my life. I mean, this fucking lama has enough charisma to make The Rock look like Ryan O’Neal.* Poor Daniel Giménez Cacho gives the best performance of his career, and still gets upstaged by an errant llama (you'll know it when you see it). Perfectly fitting, I guess, for this particular vision.

*Here you go. 

THE BEST OF 2018, AS SEEN FROM 2019: THE SERIES

ALSO, WHY NOT FOLLOW ME ON LETTERBOXD FOR EVEN MORE OPINIONS ON THINGS?

Food Of The Gods

Food Of The Gods (1976)

Dir. Bert I. Gordon

Written by Bert I. Gordon based on a “portion of a novel” by H. G. Wells

Starring Marjoe Gortner, Pamela Franklin, Ralph Meeker, Jon Cypher, Ida Lupino

FOOD OF THE GODS starts out the way I secretly want every movie to start out: with a man punching a giant chicken. The man in question is Morgan (Marjoe Gortner, more on him later), a pro football player who has arrived on a remote British Columbia island for reasons which are overexplained to the point of total nonsense. The chicken is a chicken from the farm of Mr. and Ms. Skinner (John McLiam, FIRST BLOOD, and Ida Lupino, THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT), who have been feeding their livestock a mysterious oily substance which has bubbled up on their farm. This is the titular food, although unless I misheard, the Skinners seem to say it’s the food of just one God. The thing about the Food Of The Gods is, it makes animals grow really big.

This is pretty much the best premise ever for a movie, and for awhile it seems like it just might live up to its premise. Pretty soon after the giant chicken punching, we get a fight with giant wasps and a large wasp nest (the wasps look to be roughly 10,000 times their original size, and their hive is probably three times larger than normal so it must be pretty cramped in there), then an assault on a car by giant rats (well, regular-sized rats on a tiny adorable model car) and giant flesh-eating maggots. And then some more rats. And more rats. And even more rats. And finally, more rats again.

Don’t get me wrong, it would take a stronger man than I to find no joy at all in a bunch of normal-sized rats swarming over tiny, detailed models of various sets from the movie. But it would also take a significantly more disturbed man than me to find enough joy in that concept to support an entire movie. And unfortunately that’s what FOOD OF THE GODS is betting on, devoting nearly the entirety of its latter half to a giant rodents riff on a NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD farmhouse siege conceit. This presents a problem, because it’s far too silly to be frightening or tense, but also way, way too repetitive to get by on campy charm, which leaves this giant animals vs stereotypes setup with disappointing little to recommend itself.* I suppose there are just barely enough unintended chuckles in there (“hey, look lady, I’ve already seen your chickens!”) to scrape by as ironic enjoyment, but really there’s unforgivably little enjoyment of any kind to be had here, considering how easy it should have been to make this premise into something breezy low-budget fun.

Because there’s not much to say about the movie, I’d instead like to point to something much more interesting: the movie’s star, Marjoe Gortner, doesn’t exactly have a stellar track record as an actor, even by B-movie standards (not to speak ill of STARCRASH, MAYDAY AT 40,000 FEET or AMERICAN NINJA 3: BLOOD HUNT), but he did live an interesting life: he was forced by his parents to become an evangelical preacher as a very young child, and apparently became quite popular in the traveling preacher circuit of the time, before running away to San Francisco to enjoy the hippie life after his dad absconded with the millions they’d bilked from the rubes. After a few years as a penniless hippie, though, he decided to get back into the charismatic preaching game, making bank but feeling guilty about his double life and eventually coming clean about the hidden side of big-money preaching in a 1972 tell-all documentary called MARJOE, which won the Academy Award for best documentary that year. He went from that to a fairly busy 20-year TV and B-movie career, after which he retired from acting to become a promoter and organizer for charity sporting events. None of that really comes through in his acting in FOOD OF THE GODS, but I bet he’s pretty interesting at parties.

The other interesting person in the cast is Ida Lupino, in her second-to-last on-screen performance. She’s the only person in the cast who seems to realize that this would work much better as camp, but it’s a pretty boring character and she doesn’t leave much of an impression here. Her long career as an actress and director was anything but boring, however -- she had her first starring role at the age of 14 in 1932, and spent a busy ten years as an actress before her brassy refusal to take roles that bored her ran afoul of studio boss Jack Warner, who put her on suspension. The suspension proved to be a blessing in disguise, because it pushed her into directing -- first smaller social-issues film (including a very early film about out-of-wedlock pregnancy which earned her a radio conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt) but soon some genre films as well, leading her to be the first woman to ever direct a film noir (the cynical, all-male THE HITCH-HIKER in 1953) and to co-found an independent production company with her then-husband. She would go on to direct episodes of The Twilight Zone (becoming the only woman to ever direct an episode, and the only person of either gender to both direct and star in an episode), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Untouchables and other popular shows of the time, while continuing to act on the side. That’s what I call leaning in.

Anyway, FOOD OF THE GODS is not a good movie, but now you know something interesting. Some good came of this, and sometimes that’s all you can hope for.

*It’s also pretty clear that those stunt rats are actually getting hurt, so if that sort of thing bothers you this probably ain’t the movie for you.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	Welcome To The Bottom Of The Food Chain!
TITLE ACCURACY	There is stuff which is called “Food Of The Gods” (or, “God” anyway) in the movie, although that characterization is wildly inaccurate.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, based very loosely on a “portion” of H.G. Wells’s novel The Food Of The Gods And How It Came To Earth
SEQUEL?	Yes, FOOD OF THE GODS II
REMAKE?	There’s one listed as “in production” on IMDB, but you need pro to see it.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Eco Horror, When Animals Attack!
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None. I mean, maybe Ida Lupino? But she was never really in A movies. Marjoe Gortner was in a movie which won an Oscar, but it was a documentary about him.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	No
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Oh hell yeah
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	Nah
MADNESS?	While these people do an almost inexcusably bad job of surviving, they seem to be idiots more than mentally ill.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Small animals into very large animals
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	Don’t feed your farm animals an inexplicable ooze that bubbles up out of the ground near your house. Don’t know why you would, but now you know not to.

Insidious Chapter 3

Insidious 3 (2015)

Written and directed by Leigh Whannell

Starring Dermot Mulroney, Stefanie Scott, Lin Shaye, Angus Sampson, Leigh Whannell

Oh man, it's upside-down! I hope someone got fired for this mix up!

Somehow I’ve managed to watch all the INSIDIOUS movies so far without really wanting to or caring about them at all. It’s not that I hate them or anything, it’s just that other than the bold title font, they don’t really do a lot for me. Part I and II have some interesting aspects but aren’t consistently effective. Part III changes things up by being consistently effective but not especially interesting. Generally I’d consider that a trade down, but in this case it kinda works, mostly thanks to the reliable charm of the returning Lin Shaye (NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, but most memorable to me for her nightmarish role in KINGPIN). The third sequel in a franchise which only occasionally rises to the level of “pretty good” is low-stakes enough that I can feel content to enjoy something which at least mostly works.

Plus, it’s a prequel. Which, spoiler, explains why Lin Shaye is back again, despite dying an impressive two sequels ago. It’s starting to get a little hard to find reasons to keep bringing her back at this point. It’s like if, spoiler, they kept finding ways to stick James Caan back into GODFATHER II & III. But I guess that’s OK, because she gives the whole enterprise some reason to exists which it otherwise distinctly lacks. It’s about as unexceptional as medium budget PG-13 studio horror movies come, and lacks even the wobbly ambition of CHAPTER II’s BACK-TO-THE-FUTURE-2 time-hopping. But as these things go, it’s about as good as the first two. Which isn’t saying a whole lot, but it’s something.

The plot, such as it is, is that this whiny millennial Quinn (Stephanie Scott, JEM AND THE HOLOGRAMS) thinks her dead mom is trying to get in contact with her. She goes to retired psychic Elise (Shaye) for help, but Elise advises her that meddling in “the Further” can only result in demons, etc. Which turns out to be pretty sound advice, because before long she’s being possessed by the ghost of a gas-huffing old man who looks suspiciously like a less charismatic Dr. Satan from HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES. The exact same PG-13 possession hijinks from exactly 1,765,327 similar movies play out, and eventually they beat the demon with love or something. And hey look, that’s Dylan McDermott Dermot Mulroney (YOUNG GUNS) over there, looking concerned!

This is all about as standard-issue as you can get, and the spook scenes are getting so predictable that they’re hardly even cliché by this point, they’re almost placeholders, like they meant to go back and add the actual details later and then somehow forget and released the movie with “note to self: think of something cool for this scene” written at the bottom. Whannell proves to be a director virtually indistinguishable from generally competent predecessor James Wan (who cameos as “Acting School Audition Judge,” haha), but the whole INSIDIOUS series has really only ever had one move, which is a long quiet pause and then suddenly you see a ghost accompanied by a loud musical sting. It still had a little gas left in it when the original premiered, but since then whatever little bit of shock this trick once held has been thoroughly mined to its core. Besides, the crusty old demon here is a total cold fish without any of the personality of Darth Maul’s cousin from the original, and the victim seem to almost be an intentional parody of self-absorbed high school obnoxiousness, not necessarily to the movie’s benefit. So, in summary: basic competence in providing shamelessly rehashed scares with uninteresting villains and unlikable victims. Remind me again why I liked this one?

Oh yes, it’s because INSIDIOUS CHAPTER 3 is only about that stuff to the extent it contractually has to be in order to be an INSIDIOUS sequel. Really, this is an origin story about how Elise got her groove back, and how she hooked up with her sidekicks Tucker (Angus Sampson, “Organic Mechanic” in MAX MAD: FURY ROAD) and Ira Glass (Leigh Whannell, SAW and SAW 2). Admittedly, that story doesn’t turn out to be exactly riveting either, but Shaye is just so loveable as the ghost-hunting psychic that you forgive a lot. This is really her movie. Oh sure, it has to pretend to be about some stupid white chick getting possessed, but Elise is the one who has the actual conflict, and the movie cleverly posits its whole McGuffin about the possession as an opportunity for this unassuming 70-year-old midwestern lady to get her mojo back and start kicking ass. She gets all the good drama and almost all the real pathos, too; there’s a nicely subtle tragic note to her role as a ghost whisperer pining for her recently dead husband, who knows that she could get in touch with him but doesn’t dare try it. Even more than she did in her first two appearances, Shaye gives Elise a muted sadness balanced against her natural instincts for wry comedy, and gives the role an unshowy power that carries the whole enterprise along behind it.

 The INSIDIOUS series’s secret weapon has always been a wry, goofy sense of humor, and it's at its best when it indulges this aspect, because it's too silly to get away with being grim all the time. After three movies, these fuckin’ rules about the afterlife make increasingly no sense at all, with people switching bodies and wrestling with their doppelgangers and all kinds of convoluted nonsense. But Shaye, Whannell, and Sampson manage to keep things light and agreeable without becoming outright jokey, and the entirely reasonably 97 minutes just fly by once they definitively take over the plot. It would be ridiculous for me to recommend you see something so lazily by-the-numbers when there are so many terrific films being made every year that you never get around to; this is the very definition of skippable, autopilot corporate franchise farming. But it’s not utterly without charm, and, sometimes, that’s enough.

But seriously, if we really must have a part IV, let’s have a little more hustle here. Shaye’s getting a little old to be doing all the heavy lifting by herself.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• TAGLINE: This Is How You Die. Pretty generic, unless you think about it as being said in a positive way. "Man, an in-coffin mini-bar and top-of-the-line silk-lined interior? Ritzy! This is how you die!"
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No
• SEQUEL: Third in a series which probably didn't need even one sequel
• REMAKE: No
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: USA
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: Does Dermot Mulroney count? Seems like he was kinda a big deal at one time, though given his role in this I can only assume his stock has fallen in recent years. Wasn't he in THE GREY?
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Lin Shaye, and I guess between this and the SAW's, Whannell probably counts.
• BOOBIES: None
• MULLETS: None
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: None
• HAUNTED HOUSE: Haunted... apartment building.
• MONSTER: No
• THE UNDEAD: Tons.
• POSSESSION: Oh yeah.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): No
• EVIL CULT: Nah
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: There's that doll-girl from CHAPTER 1, but she doesn't show up here. Man, I'm really striking out on the dolls this year.
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: No
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Yeah, there's this whole thing where the demon is assuming the form of this guy, you know what, it's not really important. Let's stick with "yeah."
• VOYEURISM: Not really, except the idea that the dead are watching us
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Low, it somehow made over $100 in the box office alone.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: They should have gotten Shaye for that supposed "all-female GHOSTBUSTERS" which I have been informed constitutes genocide against men.
• TITLE ACCURACY: I don't even know what it meant in the first one.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.

Elise and Quinn talk about Quinn's mom.

Spring

Spring (2015)

Dir. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead

Written by Justin Benson

Starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Nadia Hilker, Francesco Carnelutti

Any time an artist is coming off a big initial success, there’s always pressure for their next project to be the same, but bigger. This can be a tricky thing to pull off; a lot of time the talent that it takes to craft something intimate and small-scale doesn’t translate well into managing big budgets and bombast. And scaling up, even done right, does not always add up to greater impact, sometimes it can just be distancing and impersonal. But I’m happy to report here we have a rare success story: for their second full-length film (after a handful of shorts and their silly throwaway skateboarders-vs-skeletons segment of VHS VIRAL), co-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead have managed to do something pretty impressive. They’ve scaled up their minimalist 2012 horror-tinged drama RESOLUTION in every way: longer, more locations, more horror, more special effects, more ambition. But they’ve kept the thing that made RESOLUTION so special completely intact: SPRING is, for all intents and purposes, a nuanced and surprising two-person relationship drama, interwoven with some slight but important strands of creature horror. It’s intimate, vividly observed, and full of sweet but unsentimental heart. And also there’s a weird monster. My kinda jam.

Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci, THUMBSUCKER, EVIL DEAD 2014) is on a bit of a downward spiral. His mom has just died. He’s working a thankless job as a cook, angry, frustrated, going nowhere. For no real reason he picks a fight with a violent local, and decides that maybe it would be a good idea to skip town for awhile. This turns out to be a good move, because he ends up in Apulia, Italy, which looks like something fairly akin to paradise. I’m betting this is one film production that didn’t mind getting a little behind schedule. Evan quickly meets up with some funny British assholes, but then immediately and correctly ditches them pretty much the moment he sets eyes on Louise (Nadia Hilker, German TV, two upcoming DIVERGENT movies, oh goody, that sounds like a good use of her talents), a beautiful and mysterious local woman who takes an interest in him. He takes an illegal under-the-table job at the idyllic orange farm of elderly Angelo (Francesco Carnelutti, oh Jesus, he was Heath Ledger’s mentor in THE ORDER?) who dispenses some advice and also subtly makes fun of him, but the focus is really on the intense, yet tentative, relationships between these two crazy kids.

The most interesting thing here is that you’d never exactly imagine these two would find a lot of common ground. Evan is brash, young, not especially well-cultured or educated. He’s not wealthy, not especially ambitious, you get the sense he’s been stuck in the insular working-class neighborhood he’s living in for most of his life, hasn’t seen much else. Louise, on the other hand, is enigmatic, brilliant, worldly, a scholar; the kind of person who goes to a museum with you and can lecture on the exhibits without reading the sign and still not sound condescending, because her joy about the subject is so readily apparent. They have almost nothing in common... but you gotta admit, there is something there, some kind of funny spark between them. Evan may not be as educated as she is, but he’s no idiot either, he can keep up with her, not be intimidated by her. He doesn’t have a wealth of knowledge about Roman statuary, but he can follow along enough to surprise her and make her laugh.

Is this what that Love, Italian Style book was about? Because the cover does not make that clear.

She’s sort of charmed by his tenacity, but doesn’t think there’s much of a future for the two of them. And it’s hard to argue with her, because she really seems like she’s working on a different level than he is. I actually assumed Hilker was quite a bit older than Pucci -- turns out she’s actually three years younger. There’s a startling maturity and enigmatic wisdom to her performance which gives the impression of a lot of life experience; Evan, impulsive and full of conviction, seems goofy and naive in comparison. He uses a bunch of cheeseball lines that make her roll her eyes, but she also finds sort of endearing.The movie doesn’t dislike him because he’s young and corny, though -- of course he’s like that, why would he know anything? But he’s a real nice guy, and he’s sincerely doing the best that he can. At his wisest, he simply knows when it’s time to shut up. There’s a terrific scene where Evan and his ancient employer are relaxing after a day’s work, and the older man starts quietly reminiscing about his dead wife. Evan, ever the quintessential American, starts to give him a pep talk, and then suddenly stops. What does a 20-something kid have to teach an old man about love? Nothing. And the moment he realizes that, he just shuts his mouth and the two of them watch the sun set in silence. It’s a beautiful moment which simultaneously tells us something rather powerful about both characters and sets up the film’s central conflict.

See, there’s a reason Louise feels so much more worldly than Evan does; she’s had a pretty unusual life. She’s a woman of many secrets, and one of them is that she’s actually some sort of crazy Lovecraftian monster. You’d think this would be a spoiler, a big reveal at the end of the film which explains her mysterious behavior and sets up a tragic impossible love between them. But to Benson and Moorehead’s eternal credit, Evan realizes what’s going on by the halfway point. So we learn the truth not in a twist, but as just another wrinkle in this budding relationship. And then the conflict really does come down to the wisdom of their being together. Evan, idealistic, youthful, thinks they can make it work. Louise, ancient, tragic, worldly, thinks it’s impossible, maybe doesn’t even want the compromise of having a serious relationship at all. He’s got to convince her that just this once, youthful passion really is a better bet than hard-earned wisdom. Pucci really shines here; he’s ridiculously outmatched by her in every imaginable way, but somehow his uncomplicated resoluteness in the face of all logic makes him seem more of an equal to her than he should be. But an equal partner? She’s not sure. And she’s gonna have to decide relatively quickly, or risk some monstrous consequences.

Part of her ambivalence is that Louise is unusually self-assured and self-actualized both as a female romantic lead and as a silver screen monster. Both these roles so often get bogged down in guilt and loneliness and helplessness and plain need, and our male lead is tasked with saving the day, either by giving a romantic partner something she was lacking or by stopping a monster through violence. Here, neither is necessary; Louise is doing quite well on her own, thank you very much, she doesn’t have any need for some young American hero to fix her life, either romantically or by heroically curing (or destroying) her monster side. In fact, IMDB claims Benson wrote SPRING “as a counterpoint to Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles in that it is about a creature who actually enjoys its strange condition.”* Most screen monsters, starting at least with Henry Hull’s 1935 WEREWOLF OF LONDON, have been psychological symbols of repression and guilt; they strive to be human, but they have an uncontrollable monstrous side which they try to hide and control. Louise, infinitely older and more comfortable in her own skin, finds being a Lovecraftian horror to be inconvenient sometimes, but it’s more a symbol of her confidence and power than a symbol of her shame. She likes it, and probably wouldn’t give it up even if there was a cure for being a were-squid. She’s on the right track, baby, she was born this way. So what can Evan offer her that she doesn’t already have? Well, only one thing -- the kind of long-term emotional intimacy which her current life doesn’t afford much of. It’s fun to be an immortal, ultra-powered being, but she has to admit it can be a little isolating. She’s got to decide if that’s something worth giving up a part of herself to pursue, and she feels genuinely conflicted about it, even as she can hardly believe she’s pondering such a ridiculous thing.

There is something of a conflict here, but mostly the movie isn’t about tension or even mystery, it’s a strange, philosophical romantic comedy by way of a creature feature. Most of the movie is just our two leads, wandering somewhere obscenely beautiful and chit-chatting, trying to get a laugh. The most obvious comparison is Linklater’s BEFORE SUNRISE, more than DIE MONSTER DIE. The two young lovers feel each other out, push each other apart, reconcile, discover some surprises (admittedly, her surprises are probably more surprising than his, but still). It’s sweet and romantic, but not in a corny Hollywood way. You just really want these two crazy kids to end up together. Sure, she’s an ageless, cannibalistic Lovecraftian horror, but come on, no one’s perfect. She’s also a real cool, surprisingly vulnerable lady. Let’s not pigeonhole her just because of the tentacles and shit.

Still beats a creepy dwarf in a red raincoat.

Gradually, out of the pleasing and bracingly authentic little moments between them, something legitimately philosophical emerges. Louise has a much longer history to draw on than Evan does, and, besides, she’s a biologist and academic. She loves a good roll in the hay as much as anyone, and appreciates the companionship of her dorky young consort, but she fundamentally sees love as a chemical process, a biological function which history and culture have tried to gussy up in fancy words. Having a bit of a compulsive monstrous side herself, she knows how irresistibly compelling biology can be, how easy it is for the body to override the brain, which then scrambles to try to justify itself. The brain wants to turn love into something romantic and ethereal, but of course it’s just a pretty frame around a primal, animalistic urge. Why pretend otherwise? Evan is more of an idealist, he thinks there’s something more to it than that, even if he can’t really articulate what that is or exactly what it means, other than they should be together, dammit, it just feels right. Who’s right? Well, she is, obviously, and they both kind of know it. But maybe it doesn’t matter? Or maybe at least they can pretend it doesn’t?

I would just like to point out that this is my favorite tagline from the whole Chainsawnukah 2015

Nothing is spelled out for you, exactly, but come on, when was the last time you saw a love story on-screen that actually had something to say about the concept? Love as an abstract notion in our society has had the meaning all but ground out of it. I mean, walk through whatever banal, disspiriting public place you can imagine, and odds are there’s a tinny, distant store radio croaking out top ten hits from a few years back. Count the number of times you hear the word love. By the time you buy your snack-sized caramel Bugles, your deodorant and your scratch-off lotto tickets, the word “love” will have been that much more watered down and worthless. SPRING uses its surreal monster premise as a way to subtly probe the concept, to rattle the formula a little and see if it can’t shake off some rust. As a result, it achieves a much more vivid and approachable love story, as our two characters grapple both with the nebulous concept of love itself, and their impossible-to-ignore compulsion towards each other with all the tricky biological and psychological strings that entails.

On the wall of Louise’s apartment, there’s an interesting framed print which would not be familiar to most people. It is to me, though. I can’t get a screencap of the movie, but have a look:

This bizarre sequence is actually two pages of the Codex Seraphinianus, a rather mysterious book, written in an unknown language, which seems to depict through images a strange and unfamiliar world. It was published by an Italian artist and industrial designer in 1981, so its origins are modern, but its closest literary antecedent is something considerably more mysterious, the so-called Voynich Manuscript, a 15th-century work of unknown origin which is similarly written in an unknown language and features strange and unearthly flora and fauna. This is a significant image to Louise, then, for two reasons. The first is the more obvious one, it speaks to her transitional status between human and creature, and even anticipates the sexual element which is an integral part of that transformation. But the second has more to do with the text itself. The Codex Seraphinianus is a modern artifact, but it’s intentionally designed to be unknowable, and with its connection to the Voynich Manuscript, it intentionally evokes the unknowably ancient past.

That, of course, is where Louise has come from. She’s a thoroughly modern woman, plenty capable of living and succeeding in modern life, but she’s also inexorably linked to an ancient past, to experiences and wisdom no modern human would be able to relate to. There’s something inherently primordial about her, something like the Spring itself, which is both intimate and elusive, powerful and compelling in a way which goes beyond the superficial trappings of modernity. Ain’t that love for ya? Bizarre, incomprehensible, compelling, gross, beautiful, with one foot thoroughly in the modern world and one reaching back into timeless antiquity. SPRING invites us to imagine how strange and marvelous it is that this works at all, and how confusing and frustrating it can all be -- but also how much fun it can be to take the journey anyway. It may be an intimate story, but ambitions don’t get a lot bigger than that. Benson and Moorehead are slated to take on a biopic of Aleister Crowley as their next film (!?), a project which promise to be somewhat more sweeping in scope. But movies which balance the vast with the vitally personal as gracefully as this one does are rare enough that I find SPRING a very big deal indeed.

* Reading through a couple interviews with the two, they do reference Rice quite a bit, but it seems like they saw those books more as an inspiration than a rival. They talk more about how they wanted to create a character even older than the 500-year-old vampires, a character that has seen entire civilizations and ways of life come and go. Benson does note in one interview that Louise, “would probably make fun of Anne Rice’s vampires as a bunch of emo bitches. (laughs)”

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• TAGLINE: On a long enough timeline... every girl gets weird.
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No
• SEQUEL: No
• REMAKE: No
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: Shot it Italy, but by an American crew
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No. Check out the sweet-ass drone overhead shots, though. Fuckin' fly as hell.
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Pucci is working his way there.
• BOOBIES: Yes
• MULLETS: None
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: None
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: Yup, a couple of very nifty designs that I want you to see, and intentionally avoided screenshots of.
• THE UNDEAD: No
• POSSESSION: No.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No, the Italian milieu notwithstanding.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): No
• EVIL CULT: No.
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: No.
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Woman into various creatures.
• VOYEURISM: Nah
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Fairly high, I didn't even realize it was out til a buddy got it in from Netflix.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Lovecraft stories should be a lot sexier than he seemed to think they were.
• TITLE ACCURACY: It works on a metaphorical level.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.