Trog

Trog (1970)

Dir Freddie Francis

Written by Peter Bryan, John Gilling, Aben Kandel

Starring Joan Crawford, Michael Gough, Bernard Kay

            Once upon a time in rural England, three handsome young men (including future genre staple David Warbeck, RAT MAN) strip down to their underwear and explore, one at a time, the inside of a deep, previously undisturbed crevasse. The eyebrow-raising Freudian implications thereof take a backseat to the potential scientific ones, however, when they encounter a pissed-off long-time resident of the cave who kills one of them and sends the rest fleeing to the safety of a laboratory headed by the inexplicably American Dr. Brockton (holy mackerel, it's Academy Award Winner Joan Crawford! From 1926’s THE BOOB!). Obviously, we’ve got some kind of relict pre-human ape man on our hands here. Predictably, the ignorant locals, especially this total dipshit Mr. Murdock (Michael Gough, 90’s BATMAN QUADRILOGY, THE SKULL) want to kill the cave-dwelling “troglodyte,” but Dr. Brockton and her extensive collection of large-collared button-down jackets have the crazy idea that a living Trog might be a great benefit to science, especially that newfangled and still-controversial theory of evolution.*

            So far, so standard for a creature feature like this. Despite the odd murder or two, the movie understands that we’re squarely on Trog’s side here; he’s who we came to see, although of course we assume we’ll only get a few fleeting glimpses of him, budgets being what they are. And of course we can also expect a lot of dry scientific prattle from people in lab coats about modernism and the dangers of superstition and so on. That’s just what you’re gonna get in these monster movies from the 1950s… wait a tick, this was released in fucking 1970??

            That must explain, if there is an explanation, why despite the pro forma setup, TROG is a very different movie than you might expect. For starters, we’re not going to be treated to just a few glimpses of our title character at the beginning and end. In fact, he’s going to be on-screen for basically the entire thing. It’s very possible that he gets more screen time than Joan Crawford. And as soon as we get a good look at him (which happens almost immediately) it becomes clear why Dr. Brockton thinks he might be such an important scientific find: he is, it turns out, basically just a normal human, wearing fuzzy boots and loin cloth, with an ape mask he never takes off the terrifying head of a prehistoric ape! He looks like an ape-minotaur. The fact that he’s obvious just some sporty Englishman (Joe Cornelius, who had been a pro wrestler under the name “The Dazzler”) wearing an impressive but clearly artificial mask,** and no effort whatsoever is being made to disguise this fact through lighting or editing, makes for a wonderfully bonkers sensation that stretches credibility until it firmly snaps back into camp. In fact, for much of the movie I couldn’t help wondering if this was somehow a clue that this was all a weird hoax, and Dr. Brockton would eventually realize that she’s locked up a English prep school lad who donned an ape mask in a prank that ended up getting out of control.

This is not a Halloween costume or something, this is an actual frame from the movie.

            Alas, that does not turn out to be the case, and this odd physiological specimen, once caught, ends up in Dr. Brockton’s lab for a rigorously scientific regimen of tests that hahaha, I’m kidding of course, instead she teaches it to enjoy classical music and play fetch. Seriously, for virtually the entire middle two acts, this thing is fucking Pygmalion*** with Joan Crawford trying to “civilize” a buff human body topped by an ape head fixed with a single perpetually antagonized expression. And it works! Trog doesn’t change expressions or seem especially eager about any of this, but he tolerates it and can be taught the basic principal of throwing a ball back and forth and what have you. Dr. Brockton seems thrilled by this, and even brings in a series of specialists who perform surgery allowing Trog to speak! Holy shit, science is fucking nuts. She seems right on the cusp of teaching him to sing opera or play cricket, which would surely win her the Nobel Prize.

            Wouldn’t you know it, though, those ignorant townsfolk don’t understand the, uh, sophisticated scientific precision of this approach, and want Trog put down. Dr. Brockton protests on the grounds that this is her apeman, and it would be a darn shame if he was euthanized before she can teach him to play bridge or whatever. Drawing from the rich tradition of criminal jurisprudence the British Empire was so known for, the local magistrate convenes some kind of unnamed court proceedings to figure the matter out, in the most punishingly dismal square gray concrete box England has ever produced. Holy shit, TROG turns into a tense courtroom drama!

            Unfortunately, despite Dr. Brockton’s strident legal defense winning over the judge, that dickhole Mr. Murdock is not going to accept the idea that he can’t murder an unbelievably ancient and unique physical specimen that can even talk (!) just because a judge says he can’t. In fact, he expresses his contempt for legal jurisprudence by sitting in the crowd and constantly shouting out his opinions during the trial, which the judge seems to accept as qualifying him to be the prosecuting attorney. Murdock doesn’t believe in this newfangled evolution hocus pocus that the PC liberals are always cramming down his throat, and is none too pleased that this evolutionary missing link basically proves it. With the impeccable logic we’ve come to expect from religious reactionaries, he reasons if he just kills it, that will solve the problem and God will reward him for changing reality to make the Bible true.

            (END SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH) Things do not go as planned, however, and Trog ends up killing Murdock and escaping to a small but satisfying rampage, which includes impaling a butcher on a meat hook and using his prehistoric strength to tip over a car (which immediately burns to ashes, killing the driver. I hold, however, that this death was really more on the car manufacturer than the rampaging apeman. Unsafe at any speed!). Even poor Dr. Brockman has to admit that this is too far, and so the military is roused to snuff out the poor brute. Because they are the military and he is just an athletic human wearing a loin cloth and an ape mask, this proves surprisingly easy, but at least he goes down in epic style, kinda a WHITE HEAT sorta ending (spoilers for WHITE HEAT). And then poor Dr. Brockton just sadly walks off, and the credits roll. No denouement, no epilogue, no lecture on what science could have learned if only people would be more tolerant of murderous unfrozen ape men, no sad speculation on how the world could have benefitted if he’d only had time to learn to ride a unicycle. Old movies used to understand you just wanted to see the cool part of the story and could figure the rest out for yourselves. And thus, the tragic tale of TROG ends, at a breezy 91 minutes with credits.

            Obviously I desperately wanted to see this movie since I first learned of its existence, and I’m happy to report it does not disappoint. It is, of course, completely ludicrous, but it’s both earnestly ludicrous and diversely ludicrous, with new layers of insanity introduced every time the movie threatens to get into a rut. Most importantly, the two marquee stars – Joan Crawford and Trog—are in the entire thing! You could hardly be called a hopeless cynic for suspecting they roped ol’ Joan Crawford (in her final film role) into two or three days of shooting by promising bottomless martinis so they could get her name on the poster, but no, she’s the main character, on-screen for practically every scene, probably only slightly drunk and still wildly charismatic enough for us to tear our eyes off the title character to watch her. And as silly as Trog looks with his big fake ape head, look, you paid to see a Trog here (and I did! I actually paid to see this!) and the movie delivers all the goddam Trog you can handle. Director Freddie Francis orchestrates this without much style or grace (too bad, since he started his career as a cinematographer, and his two Academy Awards in that field prove he’s capable of directing better-looking material) but who the fuck cares about that shit? You get to see Joan Crawford playing ball with an apeman. If that sounds good to you, TROG delivers. If that doesn’t sound good to you, I’m sorry that you know nothing of true happiness.

            In conclusion, TROG was released October 24, 1970. Alas, The Kinks’ immortal Apeman was released a month later, on November 20, 1970, so it couldn’t be in the movie. Sometimes things just don’t work out the way they should, but that shouldn’t stop you from using science to teach animals to play sports. At least they sing it in LINK.  

* Although I’m not sure how much this will help, since despite theorizing that Trog is a relic of the ice age frozen in a glacier until recently, Dr. Brockton’s words conjure a vivid image in her listeners’ minds of Trog co-existing with some amazingly well-animated stop-motion Dinosaurs. This turns out to be recycled footage which was produced by Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen for the 1956 Warner Bros. nature documentary THE ANIMAL WORLD. Not very scientifically accurate in my opinion, and also rather strange since she never mentions dinosaurs but does specifically mention Trog getting frozen in a glacier. And by the way, even that little theory seems pretty questionable. How recently, exactly, were there glaciers covering Berkshire? Even by the most generous numbers, this assumes Trog was unfrozen 16,000 years ago. No wonder he’s such a crotchety old grouch!

** IMDB and TCM both contain trivia sections claiming the mask is a leftover from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, which seems plausible even if I can’t confirm it.

*** Fine, MY FAIR LADY, you philistine.

 

What else can one say?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	From The Boiling Rage Of A World Hurled Back One Million Years Comes… TROG. I honestly don’t understand what that means and question whether it’s even a sentence.
TITLE ACCURACY	100 fucking percent.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	UK
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Creature Feature, Mad Science
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Joan Fucking Crawford!
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Michael Gough, Freddie Francis, and co-writer John Gilling
NUDITY?	No, although some strapping young men strip down to their underwear.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Yes
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No, but Trog does have a dolly he’s fond of
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	No monster-vision here.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Science = teaching newfound animals how to be properly British.

As Above So Below

As Above So Below (2014)

Dir John Erick Dowdle

Written by John Erick Dowdle, Drew Dowdle

Starring Perdita Weeks, Ben Feldman, Edwin Hodge, François Civil, Marion Lambert, Ali Marhyar

  

            Well, it’s Chainsawnukah, so tradition dictates that you gotta get some found-footage shit in there. For years this was merely a matter of statistical probability; if two out of every three new horror movies was found footage, you just had to accept that you'd end up with at least one by sheer chance, even if you were actively trying to avoid it. This year, though, I notice that they’re not nearly as pervasive; a new trend of mopey, uneventful indie “horror” movies about sad people seems to have emerged as the fashionable way for lazy hucksters to crank out content with minimal effort. But a tradition is a tradition, so a-hunting for found-footage clusterfucks of yesteryear I went. This fit the bill nicely in that it was A) found footage and B) that’s it. I did not have high hopes for AS ABOVE, SO BELOW, even going in with the interesting trivia that it was actually shot in the real Catacombs of Paris. Great, what better way to experience a jaw-dropping real-world marvel than through an indecipherable visual jumble of shaky cam with ad-libbed shouting over top? But I watched it anyway, because that’s the kind of guy I am.

            And it turned out that was a good idea, because right off the bat, it's way nuttier than I anticipated. We begin with the introduction of our hero, the excellently-named Scarlett Marlowe (Perdita Weeks, minor roles in both HAMLET and SPICE WORLD! Now that’s a resume!) who we encounter in medias res, already on an adventure considerably more epic than you would usually find in some found-footage debacle: she’s tomb-raiding a forgotten, sinister underground shrine in Iran as part of her quest to discover the secret of famed 14th-century alchemist Nicolas Flamel. And what she discovers in Iran (after effecting an exciting escape while the cavern collapses behind her!) sends her to Paris, to uncover a secret message transcribed on the back of Flamel’s tombstone! Woah, was not expecting this crazy ass Da Vinci Code shit.

In Paris, she meets up with her dishwater-dull ex-boyfriend, George (Ben Feldman, one of the guys who gets killed in opening 15-minute mini-movie in the FRIDAY THE 13th REMAKE) and cameraman Benji (Edwin Hodge, two PURGEs), and then get right down to the business of finding the treasure map hidden on the back of Nicolas Flamel’s tombstone or whatever. You might think this in itself would require, like, a heist or something, but nope; the tombstone is just hanging there in a museum, not guarded or even behind glass or anything. I thought this whole thing was delightfully silly until I looked it up and discovered that no, this is actually a real place (the Musée de Cluny, a Paris museum devoted to the Middle Ages), and that’s probably Flamel’s real tombstone being used as a prop. Take this movie out of the “horror” section, folks, it’s a documentary! Needless to say, they waste no time in translating the Aramaic writing of a 14th-century Frenchman’s tombstone poem, and holy shit, it rhymes in English! That’s thinkin’ ahead, Nicolas Flamel, you old dog! He also apparently calculated his conspiracy numbers in feet, which seems surprising. But I guess I can't argue with them, since they're looking at the real tombstone of a legendary magical weirdo. 

This turns out to be the movie’s secret weapon. Something about the mix of fantastical bullshit with actual reality that’s even crazier really does it for me. I guess it’s why I’m so embarrassingly helpless to resist the appeal of Ancient Aliens or a good conspiracy theory or whatever. Reality is nearly always going to be weirder and more interesting than whatever bullshit some goofball found-footage director is going to be able to imagine, and so the smartest thing a fiction writer can do, sometimes, is find some little nugget of real-world insanity and piggyback on top of that, drawing tenuous but irresistible links between the stranger corners of actual reality rather than inventing new, and almost certainly less outlandish, fiction from whole cloth. The good create; the best steal. I’m sorry, but it’s fucking awesome that Nicolas Flamel really did design his own mysterious, cryptic tombstone, and that you can actually go to some museum in Paris and see it! Throw some circuitous plot and outlandish theory over top of that, and I’m a happy man.

Here’s the problem, though: I’m way into this dumbass story, but the found footage makes it 1,000 times harder to buy, because all I can think is how unnatural and phony all the acting and photography and everything about this is. I can and will happily accept that there’s a 600-year old alchemical conspiracy to solve, but I cannot accept that human beings talk or act like this, and the found-footage conceit forces me to compare this behavior to mundane reality in a way that traditional cinematic staging doesn’t. If you’re going to start throwing around the name “Nicolas Flamel” why on Earth would you ever intentionally do anything to remind the audience of what normal reality is like?

Still, as luck would have it, the tombstone sends our Da Vinci Treasure-hunters down into the endless, ancient catacombs below Paris, and of course, they actually shot there for real! Apparently this is the first film production ever to do so! And once there, the obvious objective reality of the catacombs themselves takes you a long way. Plus, our party is joined by irreverent, punk rock Parisians Papillion (François Civil, FRANK), Souxie (Marion Lambert, MONGEVILLE) and Zed (Ali Marhyar, ZERO DARK THIRTY), who agree to guide them through the dangerous maze, and have an easy, practical naturalism to them that the Americans do not. In fact, I wondered if they too were “real” – actual catacomb guides essentially playing themselves on screen. Doesn’t seem like it, but at least they inhabit their roles much more naturally than the Americans do, and contribute a real lived-in feel which grounds the film immensely. Papillion’s straightforward, pragmatic guide to how to crawl across ancient human bones without hurting your arms smacks of lived experience, and the actor delivers it with the right mix of very sensible advice and very slight smugness about his greater experience. He seems confident and reasonable and in control, in a very grounded way.

That makes it all the more potent when he suddenly doesn’t seem to be in control any more, when the skills he’s mastered betray him. Because wouldn’t you know it, before long our heroes end up hopelessly lost, and begin to suspect that something supernatural and sinister may be going down. Here, again, I appreciate François Civil's convincing mix of bafflement and panic. He should be in complete control down here –this is what he’s spent his life mastering—and yet reality refuses to cooperate. This is so fundamentally unbalancing that he doesn’t even think to conceal his shock and panic, which consequently makes it so internal that it doesn’t read to his companions as quite as devastating and potentially dangerous as it is. That kind of upending of reality is a much richer source of horror than simple fear of the unknown, and helps build an escalating unease which is surprisingly effective. Sadly, the French cast gradually gets lost in the shuffle, supplanted by Feldman and Weeks, neither of whom has even the vaguest echo of human authenticity to them. Feldman, in particular, is a total non-entity, which is especially disappointing since apparently the actor suffered from claustrophobia and must have been disturbed beyond words by the work he was doing. It doesn’t end up on the screen, though. There's a time and place for method acting, but the only important thing is what the audience actually sees. Sometimes it's better to just follow Peter Lorre's advice and 'just makes faces.' Whatever Feldman is feeling, he’s not making the appropriate face.

The found-footage approach is never believable, and almost always ugly and unnecessary, but it does get at the essential point here: this is an experiential movie. Found-footage is a miserable medium, generally speaking, for telling a story, because of its constricting focus on specific visual perspectives. But it’s a much better medium for documenting an experience, one long incident which doesn’t call for narrative finesse so much as focused intensity. At its best, the conceit traps the viewer within some kind of ordeal, refusing to grant them the omniscient safety of unmotivated editing and forcing a grueling, intimate sense of being in the thick of it. The camerawork here doesn’t do that more than thoughtful standard photography could, and in many ways it highlights the phoniness of the whole scenario and potentially lessens the impact. But it does generally get the job done sufficiently, if not optimally. It’s at least the sort of found-footage movie which understands that it’s shooting for immediacy, not realism. It doesn’t capture the strange, alien feeling of being underground better than the immensely shitty TEMPLE, though, and that ain't a high bar to clear. But it does have better ideas: it establishes a baseline of reality strong enough that small disruptions in that reality, be they phony acting or deliberate continuity breaks, have real impact. And of all the real things, there is nothing more real than the stomach-churning power of those catacombs.

The catacombs themselves are, of course, the real star –as well they should be. The feeling of all those years and all that weight above as we descend lower and lower into a claustrophobic netherworld has some genuine, undeniable power, at least to someone with my particular constellation of weaknesses (claustrophobia, antiquarianism, and Catholicism). And the idea of being trapped, forced down, down, beyond the point of no return, beyond the point where anything makes sense, perhaps into Hell itself, evokes something one encounters only very rare in a horror movie: actual horror. Philosophical horror, horror that troubles the very waters of the soul. If the movie had trusted this instinct, it might have strayed dangerously close to genuinely great territory, and damn the ugly and unnecessary shaky-cam.

Unfortunately, the movie’s actual idea of horror pales in comparison to the basic factual horror of its premise, and so much of the end is concerned with scary silent people sitting in chairs facing away from you, monsters that suddenly pop out from behind walls, and various assorted haunted house detritus. Even if the movie’s very end is suitable mind-bending, the 20 minutes of wasted goodwill leading up to it drain much of its impact.

Still, it lingered in my mind. There's something visceral and potent here, and no amount of phony acting or tired jump scares can quite dissipate the oppressive, amorphous feel of gut-deep horror that comes with the endless, maddening descent into that alien subterranean hell where the living hold no power. They can weaken that feeling, but a few days later any irritation has passed, and the troubled dreams remain. It's a feeling bigger and more powerful than AS ABOVE SO BELOW is capable of handling or channeling effectively, but at least for a little while, it at least manages to unambiguously conjure it. I wish it were great, and I think greatness was, at least at some point in the conceptual stage, within its reach. But I’ll settle for good, and it is intermittently pretty good.

Also want to point out that it introduced me to the French punk/psychaedellic band La Femme, and I think this is love.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	The Only Way Out Is Down.
TITLE ACCURACY	Pretty good, since it’s a phrase which literally suggests that our crew is going underground, and also has both religious and mystic connotations.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA, though shot on-location in Paris, France
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Found-footage, haunted house, Religious horror,
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	No
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes, ghosts
POSSESSION?	Yes
CREEPY DOLLS?	No. But there is a creepy piano!
EVIL CULT?	Yes, though we never learn much about it
MADNESS?	Certainly
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	None beyond the basic found-footage conceit.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Da Vinci Coding is more common than you might think, yet another possible career option I unwisely never considered.

Admittedly a weak 4-thumb effort, but it definitely managed to get to me at times, just enough to push it into distinctly positive territory.

Tigers Are Not Afraid

Tigers Are Not Afraid (IMDB says 2017, but it got its US release just this month in 2019)

Dir. and written by Issa López

Starring Paola Lara, Juan Ramón López, Nery Arredondo

There are a few things which seem to be irresistible to critics. Simple elements which warp normally sensible people into raving delusional supporters of mediocre garbage. One is seeing films at festivals, before anybody else, with an excited audience that feels very special just to have this opportunity. Another is making movies about adult topics, but set from children’s perspective, so we can juxtapose the innocence of youth against the grimness of the adult world. Still another is magical realism, which makes even the shallowest narratives seem mysterious and symbolic and potentially important. And finally, topical, ripped-from-the-headlines settings which empathetically document real-life woes and consequently feel very capital “I” Important.

TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID has all four, which is the only explanation I can think of for the rapturous reception it received from all quarters, including people who should have known better. I mean, people have been comparing this to Del Toro, LOS OLVIDASOS, fuckin’100 Years Of Solitude. It’s a full-blown psychosis, and it seems like I’m the only one it hasn’t touched. It brings me no joy whatsoever to report this, because who likes trashing a little indie movie, especially a foreign one made by people who I have every reason to believe are perfectly sincere about using their movie to address an ugly real-world truth which is too rarely featured in cinema, or at least too rarely from this perspective? I don’t wanna be that guy. But integrity and the fact that I am obligated to review every movie I watch during October compels me to confess to you that either A) I have finally fucking lost it, and watching so many awful Z-grade horror movies has warped my brain so badly that I can’t tell good from bad anymore or B) this movie is painfully dull, borderline insulting hokum which in no way merits a 97% Rotten Tomatoes score or even its somewhat more moderate 75% on Metacritic.

It does, I'll happily concede, have a worthwhile scenario: it concerns the orphaned children left behind after their parents are murdered in the endless, poisonous drug war which has consumed huge portions of Mexico and Latin America more generally. The city is unnamed (it was shot in Mexico City), but it barely matters because the movie mostly takes place in spaces which have essentially been abandoned by the population at large (who barely appear) and are now home to a Lord Of The Flies underworld of gangs made up of abandoned, homeless children. And I do mean children; we see a few teenagers, but mostly these are elementary-school-aged kids, barely more than babies in some cases. Of course, “elementary school” is not a great indicator in this case, since street life offers a very different kind of education.

We enter this world through the eyes of Estrella (Paola Lara, in her first feature film), a young girl on what she will discover is her last day in school. It's not a good one. A shower of gunshots nearby forces the kids to cower on the floor, and a well-meaning teacher tries to give her comfort by placing three wish-granting sticks of chalk in her hand. And the day gets worse – a supernatural trail of blood follows her, and when she gets home, she finds her mother has vanished. When she wishes on the magic chalk for her to return, she is rewarded by a visit from her mother's ghostly, zombified body, wrapped in a plastic body bag a la SICARIO. With no one to care for her, Estrella is forced out onto the street, where she meets a gang of orphans led by Shine (Juan Ramón López, also in his first film role), a tormented, angsty Jeremy Sisto type, in, uh, a 10-year old's body. He's always staring off into the middle distance moodily, and is too cynical and disaffected to feel anything but irritation at taking on a newcomer. Still, she tags along with him and his gang, and gradually comes to be involved in their conflict with a very adult gang of killers who are (semi-spoiler, if you've never seen a movie before) seeking a stolen cell phone with incriminating information about their leader, who happens to moonlight as a smarmy political candidate. This arranges the plot into something like a crime thriller, albeit one that crops up only where it's absolutely narratively necessary; the movie is much more interested to following the kids as they play, fight, and try to entertain themselves and survive without any resources.

There's nothing overwhelmingly original here, but that's a workable enough premise, at least offering a semi-exotic mix of topical misery porn and light fantasy elements. The problem is that the pleasures here are almost exclusively conceptual. It's a movie that very much resembles a movie with something to say, without ever actually getting around to saying anything. It frankly feels calculating and manipulative, preying on our natural sympathy for suffering children and using that to paper over how shallow the characterization is, let alone the transparently functional narrative. It's a film that has sympathy, but no real ideas, and certainly no real examination of its premise. The characters are paper-thin, the thriller elements are threadbare, and the fantasy –let alone any phony claim of “horror”—irrelevant.

The lack of effective genre elements is damning, but since the movie spends most of its time as a drama, it’s really the superficial characterization that dooms it. No offense to the child actors, who are doing the best they can with what they have, but their dialogue oscillates between gratingly precocious and insufferably cutesy, with no internal logic to guide it.* Shine's silly tough guy demeanor could be made interesting – perhaps it is his “tiger suit” that he puts on to feel brave, constructed from the stilted pop culture it so closely mimics. But the movie makes nothing of it; by its estimation this is perfectly natural behavior which needs no further examination (for the record, Ramón López does as well with the role as any human could have). Likewise, it stubbornly refuses to engage with Estrella's emotional state beyond the most superficial terms. Sure, she's sad, she's scared, she's angry at the people who did this. But surely there are subtler, more interesting feelings here too, especially for a child, who doesn't have the experience to know what to do with them. What does the sudden, disorienting plunge from unquestioned security to complete vulnerability do to her? How does her outsider status in the group affect the way she sees herself and her role? The movie doesn't ask. In theory, the magical realism ought to be a perfect way for us to symbolically get inside her unexpressed inner world, but the only use the movie ever finds for its fantasy elements is to throw something vaguely spooky at Estrella. Little flying dragons, the ominous trail of blood, a handful of moments where she sees ghosts. You know, to communicate that most intangible and ephemeral of human emotions, “being anxious that gangster want to kill you.” How ever would we depict that without tiny computer animated dragons?

It is, in a word, shallow. It poses that children deal with this kind of unbearable trauma by escaping into fantasy. And then, that’s it. That’s the film’s only card, and once it’s played, there’s nothing else to it but a rote, half-hearted thriller plot which sort of happens in the background, though not as far in the background as the supposed horror elements, which make up maybe five minutes of the total runtime. In fact, despite the fact that there’s a zombie on the goddam poster, this very much feels to me like one of those movies that the director wanted to make, but couldn’t get funded until she pitched it as a genre flick, so she obligingly crammed a little bit of second-unit zombie crap in there and spliced it into the story every so often to paper over the fact that it is in absolutely no way whatsoever a horror film.

This puts the film in an unfortunate contradictory position; it badly wants to be a searing indictment of the intolerable current socio-political situation, complete with some ham-fisted jabs at cynical politicians and corrupt cops. And yet, it needs the schlocky genre stuff to be a story worth telling, or at least, a story which many people would seek out. But throwing a frankly laughable crime-thriller plot into this kind of realist miserabilism is a bad fit, making the drama seem phony and making the genre stuff seem ridiculous. How the fuck are we supposed to be scared of a gang of killers which consists, apparently, of only four guys, all of whom are consistently unable to wrangle a cell phone away from five scared 3rd-graders? And for that matter, the earnest journalistic urge to call attention to drug war orphans and their grim and separate underworld can't help but force us to think a little bit about how this would work, at which point huge plot holes start to open up. Shine won't give up the stolen cell phone, even though holding onto it puts everyone in desperate mortal peril, because it has the only picture of his mom on it. Awww. But dawg, you realize that shit is in the cloud, right? You can have a photobucket account in 20 seconds for free. He clearly understands the phone and how it works, using it like a pro when he needs to. The fact that this obvious solution never comes up is a matter of strictly dramatic expediency. And for that matter, how is he charging this thing? It's just lazy writing.

I hate complaining about plot holes; I think it’s generally lazy criticism, and anyway they tend to be bothersome only when film is already not working for some other reason. A movie that has you appropriately entranced need not bother with logic, so I usually try to focus on why a film has me bored enough to notice plot holes, rather than the holes themselves. But I bring them up here because I think it helps illustrate the way the film struggles to establish a clear identity for itself. Several reviewers have postulated, for example, that this should be read as, essentially, a fairy tale for adults. Which, fine, the very concept of a “fairy tale for adults” is already a little insulting, but some people obviously get off on that, who am I to judge. If that’s so, grousing about logic is missing the point. But the minute you call it a fairy tale, you are irrecoverably giving up on the idea of muckraking realism for a cause, and that is, frankly, where the movie's actual passions seem to lie. You can have brutal, journalistic naturalism, or you can have symbolic whimsy; crudely sewing the two approaches together is self-defeating. And of the two approaches on display here, the naturalistic drama is far and away more effective, which makes you resent the constant intrusions of “fairy tale” material that doesn't seem to arise naturally from the premise, and in fact often feels like an active detriment. At one point, a kid's stuffed tiger comes to life via disconcerting computer animation and interacts with our heroine. Why? There's nothing, like, symbolic happening here. It feels like an affectation for its own sake. Likewise, Estrella's “three wishes” which are doomed to turn out badly. If we're not meant to take this literally, as a simplistic plot mechanic, well... how should we take it? It doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just a thing that would be in a fairy tale, I guess. But in a fairy tale, at least it would have a moral, the obvious “be careful what you wish for.” Here, I don’t see how that message has any bearing. The final wish, in particular, seems like such a transparently manipulative, arbitrary setup that it made me actively angry. This is not using magical realism to communicate mysterious hidden realities; this is just using it as a lazy crutch to set up a tearjerker moment which would otherwise have to be more subtly written.

I will grant that the movie eventually works up a suitable climax, which does manage to tie its thriller plot into its vestigial horror imagery, at least narratively, if not really thematically. It's as cheap and calculating as everything else here, but at least it's marginally satisfying, and I was, I suppose, invested enough in the story by this point to be glad of that. It's a dithering, facile movie, but it's not a terrible one, as far as these things go; I think I resented it more than I really disliked it. If I hadn’t read all those glowing reviews beforehand, I’d probably be willing to write it off as a mediocre but well-meaning little tearjerker drama, one that doesn’t really work but deserves credit for trying. But I think it’s gotten plenty of credit for trying already.

* I should be said that it’s always a tricky business to evaluate dialogue that’s been translated into subtitled; it’s possible this plays more organically in its original Spanish.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	None.
TITLE ACCURACY	It’s something they say, and the movie is very much about how kids deal with fear by escaping to fantasy.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Mexico
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Very, very light ghost movie trops
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	No
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No, although we hear about a tiger attack
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes, ghosts
POSSESSION?	None
CREEPY DOLLS?	I find the little animated Tiger quite creepy in a live-action WHINNE THE POOH kind of way.
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	None.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Whatever you think about Del Toro, this shit isn’t as easy as he makes it look.

This is exactly the kind of movie that makes one wish for a half-thumb; I felt like giving it just two was too harsh, because it's nowhere near as hapless as, say, THE BEING. But three makes it sound like a vague positive, and I can't quite go that far either. Think of it as two thumbs and a pinkie.