Banshee Chapter

Banshee Chapter (2013)

Dir. and written by Blair Erickson

Starring Katia Winter, Michael McMillian, Ted Levine

This weird, quasi-found-footage cheapie (it starts out as explicitly found footage, but then the rest is shot the same way even though there’s no one actively filming) mixes conspiracy thriller with Lovecraft and a dash of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and comes out with something which is less than a sum of its parts but is nonetheless kind of interesting and effective.

Our protagonist is Anne (Katia Winters, Dexter season 7), a nice young lady who decides to investigate the mysterious disappearance of her old friend James (Michael McMillian) after he leaves behind a found-footage mess explaining that he’s taken experimental drugs and that something is coming for him. Her research leads her to a mysterious numbers station broadcasting creepy calliope music all the time (is this really what our tax dollars pay for? My god, Grover Norquist was right!), secret government MKUltra experiments from the 60s, hidden desert labs in abandoned fallout shelters, mind-snatching ultradimensional conspiracies, and a mysterious countercultural novelist named Thomas Blackburn (Ted Levine, NOWHERE TO RUN, also I guess SILENCE OF THE LAMBS if you want to get technical).

Though I appreciate her desire to save electricity, this is exactly the sort of situation where I'd switch the overhead light on. But I dunno, I've never snooped around a creepy basement looking for evidence of a sinister conspiracy before, so who can say what I'd really do in her situation.

It’s a pretty cool idea for a horror/thriller, but a lot of the payoffs here are pretty disappointingly conventional. Nearly every horror scene in the movie is built around the same tiresome found-footage gimmick where people slowly walk around seeing nothing and then suddenly they catch a glimpse of a scary face or something, there’s a loud musical sting and then the camera starts shaking around everywhere as everyone runs for cover. Effective, admittedly, but a little unambitious and unimaginative for something with such a weird plot. There’s a nice incorporation of real-life conspiracy stuff (mysterious radio broadcasts, MKUltra, COINTELPRO-like disinfo campaigns) but despite a comfortably slow build, almost nothing is really expounded upon in any meaningful or interesting way, they’re just name-checked and then we move on to something else. For a super-secret multi-pronged conspiracy that stretches back decades, it’s also remarkably easy for a plucky young blonde to uncover on her own without any serious research. Usually to uncover a conspiracy you gotta spend agonizing hours going through yellowed government records; here, you just have to drive to the place where the conspiracy is and you’ll see it. Boy, how come no one thought to do that sooner?

Even so, the film has a weird sense of unease about it. It’s not really justified by the filmmaking or anything, but I think the mix of drug movie, conspiracy thriller and Lovecraftian horror is simply too potent and strange to really entire shrug off, even when the actual specifics are a little threadbare. Even though the scares themselves are run-of-the-mill, the tone and the locations (isolated Colorado deserts at night) are unusual enough that it sort of works, it sucks you in for awhile and builds to an effective paranoid patter. The long wait for the scare actually works, even if the scare itself doesn’t*. In that sense it actually gets right what most adapters of Lovecraft bungle: creating a fear of the unknown, a fear that whatever the fuck this is, it’s bad bad bad in a way you may not be ready to handle. Lovecraft usually didn’t really describe the horrors in his books either, leaving your imagination to fill in the details. This one sort of gets that, and to some degree reproduces it visually with its inky black spaces full of malicious potential, occasionally punctuated by a fleeting glimpse of some unnamable horror.

Gaaaah! It's... something!

Various internet sources claim the movie is specifically based on Lovecraft’s The Beyond, (already adapted by Stuart Gordon into a delightful body-dysmorphia horrorshow in 1986) and there are some similar ideas, though it seems like a stretch to call it a direct adaptation.** As far as I noticed, neither Lovecraft nor his story are explicitly credited on-screen, but the vibe is definitely there. In fact, it probably ranks among the very best Lovecraft-inspired films, not that it really has a ton of competition in that regard. It’s less successful as a drug movie; although drugs are a big part of the plot, the actual filmmaking is resolutely literal and as a result can’t do much with the intriguing concept of altered perception in the midst of horror. Someday someone will make the great American Drug movie/horror movie hybrid that I prophesied in my ALYCE KILLS review, but this isn’t it. Oh well, at least it’s trying.

It doesn't seem very scary now, but what if it suddenly appeared out of the blue, accompanied by a sudden loud noise, and then the camera freaked out and shook around a whole bunch. You'd be losing your shit, my friend.

There are a few moderately effective setpieces as the finale looms, and even a few pretty nifty-looking creature effects (though of course you can’t see much of them thanks to the faux-found footage camerawork). But by far the best thing about the movie actually has nothing to do with ultradimensional conspiracies or Lovecraftian horrors. The best thing turns out to be Ted Levine doing an absolutely delightful Hunter S. Thompson impersonation. Oh, his character is named “Blackburn,” but it’s so nakedly and so accurately Thompson that you can’t help but love it. Levine may even top Johnny Depp’s classic take on the famed gonzo journalist, matching Depp in eccentricity but adding a touch of Thompson’s Southern Gentlemanly charm as well.

This brings us to an odd question, because although Levine’s performance is far and away the best thing in the movie, I’m not sure it should be there. Like Guy LaPoint in TUSK, this broad, funny characterization feels like a very odd  --if not out and out irreconcilable-- mix with the otherwise serious conspiracy thriller. I’m conflicted about how well it works; on one hand, it’s hugely entertaining, but on the other it’s also a huge, weird distraction in a movie which is already a little overpacked with different ideas and directions. The movie is otherwise absolutely grim, making Levine’s lively and comic performance a welcome relief but also a dismaying tonal shift. Levine seems to find the right tone in his performance to bridge the gap, but it’s unquestionably a weird idea that sometimes at the very least teeters near total disaster. The world is definitely better off for having this performance, but I’m not sure the movie is.

We can't stop here. This is hat country.

Still, for all my gripes, this is a pretty good one. If I’m hard on it it’s because it’s so close to being a genuine classic that it’s a little disappointing that it can’t quite make it. It’s an honest attempt, though, and despite any missteps it manages to take a really cool idea and pull it off even with what must be a torturously low budget. If this guy Blair Erickson can hire an actual cameraman next time, I think he may well have what it takes to make some real honest-to-god scary films. Or at least a better version of The Rum Diaries. Maybe with a dash of PREDATOR or something thrown in there just for fun. Boy, I’m obviously against ultradimensional mind-control conspiracies, but when ya type a sentence like “The Rum Diaries meet PREDATOR” I gotta admit, it’s hard not to see the appeal.

PS: The poster for this one claims: “From the producer of MARGIN CALL.” Kinda weird to assume there’s a ton of crossover of people who loved MARGIN CALL and also would be interested in a found-footage Lovecraftian conspiracy thriller with drug elements, but that’s technically true. The weirder part, though, is the producer they’re referring to is Zachary Quinto! You know, that new Spock who instead of being like old Spock is sexy and angry all the time! Guess he’s putting that STAR TREK money to good use as penance for being part of such a desperate cash grab. But hey, if he keeps producing movies this interesting, I’ll forgive him for it.  

PPS: Wow, apparently this is the first movie ever to have an Oculus Rift Virtual Reality edition. I could really see it working for this one, since the virtual reality element would sit nicely with the otherwise unexplained point-of-view footage and really immerse you in the action. When I get an Oculus Rift in 20 years or whenever they become affordable, I’ll totally check this out again!

*Which --counterintuitively-- is arguably better than the inverse, because you’re going to spend way more time in the buildup than you ever will the payoff.

**It also hilariously bills itself as a true story, presumably because there was such a thing as MKUltra (by that same logic, Seagal’s SUBMERGED and SHADOW MAN are also true stories).

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2014 CHECKLIST!

The Hunt For Dread October

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Arguably loosely adapted from Lovecraft's The Beyond.
• SEQUEL: None
• REMAKE: No, although there is a 1986 Stuart Gordon version of THE BEYOND.
• FOREIGNER: Nein.
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: Yes. Explicitly so at the beginning with a few bits scattered throughout; otherwise, it just mimics the style without specifically having a camera present. Why they would do this I do not know, I just watch 'em.
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: Ted Levine isn't exactly A-list, but it's still cool he's in this.
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: None
• BOOBIES: Nope
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Top of skull sawed off.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: Some kind of Lovecrafty thing, you can't see it really but I bet it's cool.
• THE UNDEAD: Nah
• POSSESSION: Yes, there is a strong implication of possession here, though not the usual ghostly kind, more of a mind-control deal.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: Nah
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): No
• EVIL CULT: Nah
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: Nope
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Yeah, I think there's a suggestion of that here.
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Mid. Got tiny theatrical release apparently, but it's been on Netflix ever since.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Just say no to alien drugs.
• TITLE ACCURACY: Absolutely, 100% inexplicable. No Banshee, no chapter, nothing that would even remotely indicate what in the hell that means.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A

Alyce Kills

Alyce Kills (2011)

Dir. and written by Jay Lee

Starring Jade Dornfeld, Tamara Feldman, Eddie Rouse, James Duvall

So what we got here is a really solid, drugged up losing-your-sanity movie that slowly, almost imperceptibly, evolves from a grounded psychological horror to a more familiar genre bloodletting. It’s kinda bold, when you get right down to it, and I imagine it’s gonna put off a lot of people who would prefer either a dramatic, psychological story or a horror show bloodbath, but won’t necessarily like the two stuck together in a haze of psychedelic drugs. To me, of course, that sounds great, and I’m sure you’ll love it too.*

Basically, this is the story of Alyce (Jade Dornfeld), who you should immediately assume is some kind of sociopathic monster because she spells her name with a goddam y. Even that evil little shit Alice from ALICE SWEET ALICE at least had the decency to use an “i” like a decent, god-fearing sort of person. But Alyce seems ok at first, she’s sort of mousy and nondescript, a nice gal but an obvious hanger-on to her best friend, the much more confident and dynamic Carroll (Tamara Feldman, HATCHET). The two of them enjoy a night of wild excess --clearly the most genuine human contact Alyce has experienced in a long time-- during which they find out Carroll’s boyfriend has been cheating, get wasted, take a bunch of drugs, and end up on the roof of Alyce’s building. Not alway the most promising sequence of events, and by the end of it, Carroll takes a dive off the roof and Alyce finds herself lying to the cops about it. But did Carroll fall in a drugged out stupor, or did Alyce give her a push? And if so, why?

The smoking gun

With her one friend gone, Alyce plunges into a nightmare of spiralling addiction and guilt-ridden paranoia, relying on Carroll’s former drug dealer (Eddie Rouse, AMERICAN GANGSTER, mesmerizing here) to dull her pain, even as he shamelessly exploits her needs (financially, sexually, and through the medium of delivering rambling Tarantino-esque monologues). But gradually, her breakdown causes her to refocus herself, and without the boundaries of her old life her inclinations take on a worrisomely murderous timbre.

Frankly, I find it bizarre that this is the first movie I’ve seen in a very long time to attempt to meld a drug movie with a horror plot. They seem like they ought to go together so well -- horror movies, like drug movies, are so much about tearing away the mundane trappings of consensus reality and exposing the bizarre things that spill out of the human brain when it’s not properly constrained. After all, the horror that arises from being uncertain about reality goes back to Poe’s stories of madness and unstable narrators -- the altered perspective brought on by drugs seems like a completely intuitive mirror for this kind of psychological adventurism. In fact, a lot of the best horror are almost drug movies already; giallos especially are rightly famous for their surreal, expressionistic imagery and lack of narrative logic. Throw in a scene at the start where everyone does mushrooms and it would almost let them make more sense. Yet, you just don’t see this attempted much. There’s POP SKULL, which is terrible but at least is trying. There’s SHROOMS, which I haven’t seen. I guess LOVELY MOLLY does have a drug element, but it never seems like that’s responsible for her hallucinations or whatever. Hmm. Internet says TOAD ROAD (I haven’t seen it) and BLUE SUNSHINE (haven’t seen it). Somebody needs to get on this, I swear to you it’s gonna be golden someday.

Anway, Jay Lee (director of, holy shit, fucking ZOMBIE STRIPPERS?!) does a fine job cultivating a sweaty, hallucinogenic tone here, and is rewarded by a fine lead cast (Dornfeld, Feldman and Rouse are all terrific, the second-tier cast is noticeably less so). The movie has a kind of grim cartoonishness to it at times, but it also finds quite a nuanced protagonist in Alyce, who, I think, means well on some level but eventually snaps from her own isolation and feelings of powerlessness. She’s sympathetic, even pathetic, but at the same time there’s a wheedling strand of real gleeful sadism there too, perhaps an understandable reaction to a world which seems to constantly reject her but nevertheless more than enough to make her unstable and dangerous. Even before her real drug-fueled slide from sanity documented in the movie, she at least considered murdering her best friend, even if maybe she never imagined she’d actually do it (and maybe she didn’t, but still knows enough to feel guilty about it). So she’s a complex character; someone who we feel for, but also see is perhaps much more capable of violence than even she realizes.

One wonders, is this actually a story of female empowerment through domination and violence, a la KICK-ASS or WANTED? I mean, Alyce has a lot in common with the rejected, frustrated male protagonists of those movies, and her eventual self-confidence boost from brutal violence is exactly the same. The only thing it lacks is those movies’ labored efforts to put their protagonists’ violent empowerment in a more morally safe context (don’t worry, the movie tells us, they’re murdering people for truth and justice and shit! Everybody wins!). ALYCE KILLS is somewhat more honest than that; Alyce feels disempowered and unfairly maligned, and eventually lashes out just to show she can. And you gotta admit, the movie doesn’t entirely condemn her for it, after all, the people she kills really are total assholes. And she really does seem much happier this way. Maybe director Lee is trying to crack open the darker aspects of that famously unpleasant nerd-empowerment narrative by putting a more emotionally vulnerable woman at the heart of the story and letting the results speak for themselves? I dunno, I guess it doesn’t really feel like some kinda meta commentary, but you gotta admit the familiarity of these story beats is interesting. KICK-ASS is almost identical, except that the people he kills are criminals, instead of emotional bullies (making it totally morally acceptable in the eyes of the film, and making him into a hero while she’s a psychopath).

Food network needs more shows like this.

Regardless of the intent, it’s nice to see a woman at the heart of a story like this, and it’s even nicer to see her presented as a complex, flawed character. There’s a pleasing ambiguity to it all, too; once the drugs enter the picture you never really know for sure what exactly is real, and you never get a full backstory on Alyce either, so although you learn a lot about her from how she reacts to the events of the movie, there’s never any explicit (read: lazy) answer for how she ended up this way. There’s no flashback where as a child she saw her mom having sex with a sailor and that explains why she turns out to be a killer, like you would get in a giallo. The movie’s more or less narratively direct, but it gives you plenty of space to try and muse over some of the details here, and never feels the need to overexplain or psychoanalyze out loud. Surprisingly confident move there for a guy who named his last movie ZOMBIE STRIPPERS.

ALYCE KILLS is at its best early on, when it luxuriates in a guilt-ridden hallucinogenic slide into madness. At about the last quarter, it turns a little pulpier (and a whole lot bloodier), which is fun, well-executed genre payoff but maybe not quite as affecting as the more internalized, psychological horror of the three quarters. I mean, it’s got some top-shelf gore, a nice streak of jet-black humor, and a genuine tension about where things are gonna go. But I liked it better when it was playing a bit more earnestly. Alyce is too interesting a character to ever get completely overwhelmed, no matter how much goopy red stuff she gets covered in, but come on, lots of movies have blood. Few movies have the ambition to crack open the kind of chaotic, intriguing mind we see gradually tear itself apart here. Maybe Lee should have trusted that to take us all the way here. Either way, though, an enjoyable attempt. The great American horror/drug movie has yet to be made, but ALYCE KILLS is a real solid attempt, and full of pleasures both prurient and a bit more ethereal.

*Warning, certainty on my part should not be confused with the recommendation of a person with good judgement. Talk to your doctor to see if madess, ultraviolence and mild-altering drugs are right for you.

So, this is the German cover for ALYCE KILLS. Notice anything different?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2014 CHECKLIST!

The Hunt For Dread October

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No
• SEQUEL: Nope
• REMAKE: Nope
• FOREIGNER: Nope
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None.
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: None.
• BOOBIES: Yes.
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: Some pretty borderline stuff, anyway.
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Significant limb loss, body blended into goo.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: None.
• THE UNDEAD: Alyce gets a few visits by Carroll's ghost, but its never clear if this is real or a drug-induced hallucination.
• POSSESSION: No
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): Yes
• EVIL CULT: None
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: No dolls.
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: None.
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: High, little indie
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Drugs, rooftops, and emotionally unstable friends are not a winning mixture.
• TITLE ACCURACY: 100% confirmed, accurate.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A

Only Lovers Left Alive

Only Lovers Left Alive (2014)

Dir. and written by Jim Jarmusch

Starring Tom Hiddleston, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Mia Wasikowska, Anton Yelchin, Jeffrey Wright

With ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE and DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS, it looks like 2014 is finally the year for celebrated indie auteurs to give in and join mainstream film’s inexorable slide towards an all-vampire-all-the-time format. And hey, that works for me, at least while they’re making vampire films they can give zombie films a rest for awhile. And since it’s painfully clear that there’s nowhere left to go with the conceit as it was originally envisioned, I suppose it’s the natural order that now the tattered scraps of the concept drift down to the indie underworld to be fully deconstructed and rebuilt as bijou postmodern trifles. Circle of life, I guess; the whale carcass of the Vampire film has finally exhausted the sharks swimming near the culture’s surface and has drifted down to the ocean’s floor so the giant isopods and spider crabs can wrest the last bit of meat from its bones. What a time to be alive.

But hey, there is an obvious upside: we get a Jim Jarmusch vampire movie! Jarmusch has been cool pretty much since they invented the concept (and has distanced himself now that it got popular), and it’s always fun to see him working in quasi-genre mode (DOWN BY LAW, DEAD MAN, GHOST DOG). Even if this one could stand some cheaper thrills, its neat to see how his offeat, conversational filmmaking incorporates something as shamelessly hokey as vampirism. If it doesn’t lend him the same focus and energy that the urban* samurai concept did in GHOST DOG, at least it gives him a few fun gimmicks to play around with, and adds a little color to his typically talky, cerebral slacker screenplay.

Happiness is a warm blood.

What we got here is this guy, Adam (Loki), an eccentric musician who lives in self-imposed hermitude in a dilapidated rowhouse somewhere in the abandoned ruins of Detroit (no, it’s not in the post-apocalyptic future, that’s just what Detroit looks like now). Between this movie and SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN, I’m beginning to wonder if the only remaining residents of Detroit are reclusive musical geniuses, but Adam has an extra gimmick up his sleeve to ace out Rodriguez: he’s a centuries-old vampire (I’m assuming Rodriguez isn’t a vampire, obviously. If he is, the movie is uncharacteristically tactful about it). He’s been kickin’ it with the cool kids for the last couple hundred years, rubbing elbows with Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt, always a delight), Schubert, Lord Byron, etc. and now apparently spends most of his time name-dropping them into casual conversation. But lately, he's in a funk, shirtlessly sulking in his gloomy, analogue-recording-strewn house and glumly bemoaning the current state of mankind. He’s so gloomy he even considers suicide by way of wooden bullet (cool idea, maybe Blade should consider making the switch to wood) and so his wife Eve (Tilda Swinton, another in a string of great performances this year) decides to leave her Tangiers home and fly over for a visit. At least this way, there's someone around who appreciates the names he's dropping.

On the subject of namedropping, it’s a bigger part of this than you might think. “Remember when you gave that string quintet to Schubert?” they’ll say, and we laugh, haha, its funny because thats a famous person from a long time ago. Jarmusch must find that particularly amusing, because he does it again and again. Possibly more times than you will find amusing, and certainly more times than I did. OK dude I get it, you went to college. But it’s not like these are exactly deep cuts. When Eve (get it? It’s a reference!**) checks onto a commercial flight under the name “Daisy Buchanan,” the obnoxious indie snob audience I watched with tittered, haha, its from The Great Gatsby. Uh, yeah, I guess, but so what? Shit, who knows if she even read the book, she probably just saw the 100 million dollar all-star 3-D movie adaptation from last year. Its weird, Jarmusch has never struck me as a guy who felt insecure enough to name drop a bunch of Freshmen historical references, so I don’t know what he was going for here. It just makes these guys seem like total fame whores. In fact, small wonder their lives are so empty these days given the sorry state of modern celebrity. What, they’re gonna go from Christopher Marlowe to Kim Kardashian? All this depression is starting to come into focus here, I think I cracked the code.

There is one celebrity that we know for sure Adam likes: as he gives Eve the Detroit tour, he excitedly points out the house where Jack White grew up. You’d think he’d introduce himself, being a famous musician and all, but maybe he’s too shy. I mean, he hung with Lord Byron, sure, but Jack White? That’s the big leagues. We don’t find out if the lovebirds also stop at Kid Rock’s house, but I figure it’s implied, obviously. The bigger disappointment is that they don’t go visit Iggy Pop! They could have even got a cameo, since Jarmusch knows him from DEAD MAN and COFFEE AND CIGARETTES. So no Iggy, no Kid Rock, no Eminem, and to add insult to injury the one band we see in Detroit (stoner rockers White Hills) are from New York, they’re not even locals. They’re gonna have a lot of Detroit musical cameos to squeeze EXPENDABLES-style into the sequel to make up for that one. Adam’s music, incidentally, is provided by Jarmusch’s own band, the excellently named SQÜRL. Seems a little pretentious to attribute your own music to a character that everyone is constantly calling a musical genius, but oh well, they are pretty good tunes. Maybe a tad gloomy for my usual taste, but they sound cool and work nicely with the atmosphere. Hopefully he can throw a couple novelty joke songs or something on there for the kids before the album drops.

Somewhere in the infinity of existence, there is an alternate universe where Joe Strummer lived long enough to play a vampire in a Jim Jarmusch film. It is a happier universe.

Of course, a little levity was probably a good thought, because on their own these vampires aren’t really a whole lot of fun. They’ve been around so long they’re basically just tired of the whole “life” thing, they’ve reached that stage in their relationship where all they want to do is stay in, watch a movie, drink a little blood, and go to bed early. Both Hiddleston and (especially) Swinton do a brilliant job inhabiting these incomprehensibly ancient creatures, turning in performances which reveal the weight of all the years hanging on their still-youthful bodies. There’s a sense of truly profound romantic melancholy that lingers here; these people are too old to be angry, they’re just sad and clinging tightly to the few truly good things they’ve found in a world which experience has taught them is mostly full of disappointment. There are a few magic moments, as Jarmusch makes use of the jaw-dropping urban decay of modern Detroit, where the haunting atmosphere, low-key sexual intensity, and jarring real-world devastation fold sublimely into each other and create scenes of subtle power. But a few transcendent scenes do not a movie make. Loki and Swinton are never less than excellent, but that doesn’t always translate to being interesting to watch. After all, who wants to watch old people lay around feeling sorry for themselves and mumbling about the world going to crap? After a few days with these morose goth kids, you’re starting to eye that wooden bullet a bit more closely.

Fortunately, just as things seem doomed to sink into an abyss of twee artistic sad-sack self-gratification, Ava happens. Ava (Mia Wasikowska) is Eve’s sister, a force of chaos destructive enough to shake these two grumpy cats out of their slump and introduce a note of jagged volatility to the proceedings. Adam is openly hostile to her over an unspecified event from some time ago (dozens of years? hundreds?) but Eve tries to play peacemaker, keep the family together. For her part, Ava can barely contain her glee in tormenting her somber host.  It’s a fabulous dynamic, because Wasikowska is every bit the dangerous live wire, the total antithesis of our protagonists’ staid, intellectual gloom. This is a being that lives for tumult, and every minute she’s around there’s a crackling apprehension about when and how she’s going to bring the hammer down.

That's a helluva evil eye.

Ava’s introduction jars the film to life, stirring conflict and delivering focus to what was threatening to become an atmospheric but impassive affair. She forces Adam and Eve to get off their asses and actually go places and do things, revealing how surprisingly fragile their little world is and pushing them, reluctantly, into some discomfort. Almost against its will, the film seems to summon some energy and even some tension, testing the resolve of its languid protagonists and making them genuinely consider if it's worth fighting to live in this world which so disappoints them.

At first I wasn’t sure the whole vampire aspect really mattered much, thought maybe it was just kind of a romantic conceit that Jarmusch was associating with gloomy emo kids. But actually in retrospect, it makes more sense: the movie is fundamentally about a kind of parasitic entropy. The vamps in question are parasites of humanity, they need them as a source of food and to secure their safety and anonymity. The humans (derisively referred to as ”Muggles” “Zombies” here***), for their part, are parasites on the very planet itself, sucking it dry and poisoning it and themselves in the process, to the point where their very blood is dangerous fodder. And maybe the whole system is starting to come down, just look at poor Detroit, the shadow of its former splendor still unmistakable enough to taunt the locals with a reminder of better times. Just how long can these two parallel vampire cultures persist before the whole thing collapses, and how are we supposed to feel being part of such a horrifying enterprise?

At first it seems like the movie’s answer is my own: if we’re horrified of the system we hide from it, hole up in a house somewhere feeling depressed and superior to everyone, try to imagine we’re independent from it. But that’s a facade, and the movie’s interested in what our immortal heroes will do to survive if push comes to shove. And of course, we Zombies are no different, we just have a few more middlemen in between us and the murderous vampirism which allows our world to function so we don’t have to experience the consequences of our selfishness quite as directly. At least, not until it all comes down.

Cool kids wear shades. 

Still, I don’t think Jarmusch is judging us, or them; he’s simply bemoaning the inevitable nature of entropy, and that no matter how immortal you may feel, someday everything eventually winds down. Detroit, vampires, rock n’ roll, the amount of amusement you can get from repeating tedious freshman lit references to famous historical figures. All you can do is try and find the things that really mean something to you, and hold onto them as fiercely as you can until they, too, are inevitably taken away. If we do that, maybe on some level our rapaciousness is an act of love, even as its destructive consequences pile up.

Anyway, a pretty good movie if you’re in the mood for a somewhat lethargic, atmospheric-laden vampire slacker romance stoner flick. If this is the future of Indie horror genre deconstructionism, well, at least it’s better than having to deal with a bunch of new Dracula adaptations. It’s a bit slow, a bit meandering, but it gradually draws a kind of ephemeral power out of its quiet alchemy of music, darkness, chattiness, and evocative locations. I think I liked more of it than I loved, but even if in the end only lovers will be left alive****, hopefully us likers will still have a good run. Or at least long enough to see what Spike Lee does with this.

"Remember that historical event that we witnessed that one time?" 

* That’s code for “black guy”

** But, Jarmusch says, not exactly convincingly, not to what you think it is. Instead, it’s a reference to Mark Twain’s “The Diaries of Adam and Eve.” Might want to make that a bit more explicit, Jim; its like saying you’re a big Elvis fan, and then acting confused when I play “Hound Dog” and rejoining that you meant Elvis Costello.

*** Oh great, next thing you know Jarmusch is gonna be making Zombie movies too. 2018 EDIT: Ha, I guess I should have known that, like all things that seemed like a hilarious joke in 2014, this would eventually become a horrifying reality.

**** A subtle variation of the oft-repeated HIGHLANDER prediction, of course. Anyone else thinking crossover?