Baskin

Baskin (2015)

Dir Can Evrenol

Written by Can Evrenol, Cem Özüduru, Erçin Sadıkoğlu, Eren Akay

Starring Mehmet Cerrahoğlu, Ergun Kuyucu

This is the official poster for this film....

BASKIN opens with a child wakened from sleep by the sounds of a woman having sex. He wanders into the living room, where an abandoned TV is blanketing the darkened room with an eerie static. When he turns off the TV, he notices a strange red light emanating from the bedroom he just left. As he tentatively approaches the door, suddenly a robed arm reaches out and grabs him.

We cut from there to a dingy diner, where five police officers are sitting around a table enjoying themselves. They’re crass and loud, shouting at the staff and discussing their first sexual experiences in the filthiest possible way (one implies he lost his virginity to a chicken). When a young waiter laughs at a tale of a mistaken transvestite hooker, the furious storyteller gets in his face and punches him. But they’ll pay for their macho redneck dickishness many times over by the end of the night, because they’re about to answer a routine call which will send them into a hallucinogenic nightmare from which there is no escape.

Yes, ladies and gentleman, this is it: The movie that Rob Zombie has spent his whole career trying unsuccessfully to make. Profane, bizarre, laden with sumptuously filmed decay, and filled with crazy crap and interesting actors with weird faces playing amusing but indefensible assholes. This is the movie HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES wants to be when it grows up. And amazingly, it’s the full-length debut of Turkish co-writer/director Can Evrenol, based on his 2013 short film of the same name.

...But this one is far, far more revealing about what you're in for.

We talked glancingly about Turkish horror last year, when I watched DJINN (2013) and JINN (2014) in an effort to watch some Islamic horror movies as penance for all the explicitly Christian imagery and motifs which dominate a huge portion of the Western horror tradition. As you’ll recall, I found that --outside of Indonesia, which I’m invoking my right as an American to forget is Muslim-- there just really aren’t a ton of horror movies from Islamic countries, even Turkey, which boasts a long and boisterous history of genre cinema. The only one I could locate at the time was a 2008 Turkish horror film unfortunately titled SEMUN. But an article from the (English-language?) Turkish newspaper Hurriyetdailynews.com lists a few more, including Hasan Karacadağ’s D@BBE from 2006 (the first in a series which it claims is now up to 6 installments?!), Biray Dalkıran’s “ARAF (Purgatory) from the same year*, and Cem Akyoldaş’s KONAK (Old Mansion) from 2009.

Author Emrah Güler writes that “An overbearing conservativeness is felt in almost all of the films, with punishment being the driving force, and those who are punished is almost always predictable.” -- the protagonist in ARAF is punished for having an abortion, for example. Hardly a rare charge in horror cinema writ large --after all, many American horror films (and slashers in particular) have been accused of draconian conservative moral schemas-- but interesting to see the same impulse put to a slightly different set of ethical priorities. Mostly, though, Güler seems to accuse Turkish horror of merely imitating the Western model, charging the genre with,

“The appropriation of traditional and Islamic horror motifs to classic examples from Hollywood, or more recent Asian horror cinema, has become the defining characteristic of these films...The string of recent Turkish horror films take haunted houses, teen-slashers and other-worldly entities and tailor them to Turkish and Islamic culture. Ghosts and zombies become jinns, exorcism is done by hodjas and the apocalypse takes its own version from the Quran. Historic Ottoman manors become haunted houses, and ancient spirits of Islamic folklore haunt sinners.”

He goes on, though, to make one exception:

“BASKIN is a genre-bending breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale genre of Turkish cinema.”  

Indeed, although BASKIN is a 100% Turkish production, I’m not even certain it belongs in the category of “Islamic horror,” because I can’t confirm if Evrenol himself is actually Muslim. In several interviews he speaks extensively about his influences (in a March 2016 Fangoria Q & A, they’re mostly Western -- he name checks Hammer, Lovecraft and Clive Barker, along with HELLRAISER, THE DESCENT, FRONTIER(S) and a few more unexpected things: the Belgian film CALVAIRE, the obscure 2008 European film VINYAN, ONLY GOD FORGIVES, CONAN, THE DARK CRYSTAL, and Iron Maiden)** but there’s no discussion of any kind about religion. If BASKIN has any distinct link to a Muslim perspective or Turkish/Islamic folklore or culture, it’s completely lost on me.

And that’s not really a huge surprise, because BASKIN is a profoundly weird movie all around. It’s not a movie which can be meaningfully described with a plot synopsis, since that would just be “there are these cops who go to this old building, and then everything gets weird and crazy and they get killed by cultists or demons or something.” And that doesn’t really capture the experience very well. Maybe a closer synopsis would be “A bunch of asshole cops gradually end up in a Turkish cenobite love nest with a raft of demonic perversity and weird, inscrutable symbolism (i.e. lots of locks and keys[?]).” That’s getting closer, but I think the best thing would probably be to eschew the plot altogether and just say: “Feels like what would happen if Turkey got HELLRAISER and SUSPIRIA the same year and some young horror nut got inspired to smash them together, complete with a vaguely Goblin-esque score and a bunch of primary colored lights.”

If you would like a movie like that, you will like this one. The low budget does show itself occasionally (mostly, perhaps, in the limited action and single location of the climax), but Evrenol mostly does a masterful job controlling the look and feel of the film and conveying an appropriate sense of surreal Caligulan overkill. And he has an ace in the hole in actor Mehmet Cerrahoglu, who plays the demonic “Father.” Cerrahoglu, who suffers from an incredibly rare genetic deformity, was certainly cast because of his startling appearance,*** but the actor (a car park attendant with no prior acting experience) commits to the role with a lugubrious malevolence which is absolutely riveting to behold. He might have been hired to save money on the makeup budget, but he absolutely walks away with the movie. As inscrutable as the character and the scenario is, I feel certain he could sustain a dozen or so direct-to-video sequels purely on the strength of his weirdo moxie. And I can certainly think of no stronger endorsement than that for a horror movie icon.

BASKIN isn’t perfect; the latter half is hobbled somewhat by the lack of meaningfully active protagonists (they’re chained up and only able to observe the debauchery), which blunts the movie’s momentum pretty significant. Without the kinetic force of an advancing plot, it gets bogged down in some typical torture porn tedium as characters get exotically brutalized but the tension gradually seeps away. It still looks great and packs in plenty of gothic weirdness, but there’s no getting around the fundamental problem with the torture porn paradigm: when characters have no means to resist danger, their plight becomes pitiable instead of exciting. But it’s weird and sick enough to get by, mostly; if it sinks into a morass of sadism instead of adrenaline, at least it does it in a fairly exotic and memorable way. Less forgivable is the final twist (SPOILER) -- yet another fucking indie horror time-loop. Just like (spoilers for all the following films) DEAD END and MINE GAMES and THE REEDS and THE ABANDONED, TRIANGLE, LET’S BE EVIL, THE HOUSE AT THE END OF TIME, YELLOWBRICKROAD, TIME CRIMES, SALVAGE, DARK COUNTRY, THE DEVIL’S PASS, THE DIABOLICAL, BLOOD PUNCH, etc, etc, etc. I think it’s time we all came together as a society and agreed to retire this stupid fucking twist for awhile, maybe pack it into a time capsule and send it a hundred years into the future when it might seem fresh again for a few minutes, or at least before every fucking indie horror hack hoping to blow your mind has to throw it in at the last minute and ruin everything.

Fortunately, though, that’s really the only part of BASKIN that feels boring and derivative, and it’s only about 2 minutes of screen time. Well, that and the title; BASKIN apparently translates as “Raid.” But the rest of the runtime, it’s a rare movie which wears its influences openly, and yet still feels like a thoroughly cohesive, uniquely idiosyncratic work. I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece, or even the best new horror movie I watched recently; I watch a lot of indie horror movies, and they’re mostly pretty good (certainly, they’ve recently had a vastly better track record than studio horror flicks). But it’s definitely one of the most exciting new horror finds I’ve come across in ages. It's not just a pastiche or a clever riff on an old classic; it's beholden to those things, but also enthusiastically inventive, brazen, and ambitious to an extent which is virtually unheard of in a film this cheap, and especially from a first feature. If Evrenol can bring this level of fervor and raw talent to a project with some real budget behind it, I think we can start looking forward to a real classic, maybe something genuinely iconic.

Ah, who am I kidding? They’ll probably just rope him into directing a Silver Surfer reboot and that’ll be that. Hollywood is far more venal and seductive than any coven of demonic freaks could ever aspire to be.

* Not to be confused with Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s 2012 film of the same name.

** Here is a man who’s life will someday be changed forever when he discovers Ken Russell.

*** I know people today are a little uneasy about hiring actors with deformities (comparisons with exploitative and dehumanizing freak shows are inevitable) but reading Evrenol’s Q & A makes it clear how much he respected Cerrahoglu and worked with him to create the character. And ask yourself -- would Cerrahoglu really have been better off if Evrenol decided it would be more sensitive to just leave him to his life as a car park attendant?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	Enter A World Of Suffering And Madness
TITLE ACCURACY	BASKIN translates as “Raid,” which has now been a completely terrible name for three terrific movies which deserve better.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Turkey
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Uhhhh… demons? Surrealism?
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None, although hopefully Mehmet Cerrahoglu is headed in that direction now.
NUDITY?	Some kind of topless cow demon lady
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Man made to have sex against his will. Unclear what his demonic partner’s consent status is.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Lots of frogs, though they don’t do much more than the frogs in FROGS.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	I guess the building is some sort of portal to hell? Also, there’s a story told about (presumably) a ghost, though I think we’re to assume most of the problems here are demonic in nature.
POSSESSION?	None explicit, though maybe that’s what is being attempted by our antagonists?
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	Oh yeah
MADNESS?	Looks like our hero has his mind done broke by the end
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	It is possible to entirely avoid ice cream jokes in a review for a movie called BASKIN.

Let Us Prey

Let Us Prey (2014)

Dir. Brian O’Malley

Written by Fiona Watson, David Cairns

Starring Liam Cunningham, Pollyanna McIntosh, Douglas Russell

So here’s one of those modern high-concept indie horror joints from an ambitious first-time feature director who managed to get a couple low-profile genre actors and stick em into a Twilight Zone kinda scenario which doesn’t require a lot of locations or setpieces or anything. We’ve been looking at a lot of these lately. This one’s a little less mumblecore and a little less concerned with gritty realism than some; the performances are broader, the dialogue (by first-time feature writers Fiona Watson and David Cairns) is a little more self-consciously overwritten, the colors are more stylized (lots of vivid green and orange lighting without a clear source), the violence is more over-the-top. But still, it seems like any number of movies like this; competently crafted but not nearly as clever as it thinks it is, moderately entertaining but too derivative to leave much of an impact. Until suddenly, it isn’t like those other films anymore, and everything has gone crazy and it turns out to be a pretty fun time. You’ll have to wait to get there, but trust me, it will get there.

The predictable part of the movie concerns a mysterious, nameless drifter (old workhorse Liam Cunningham, DOG SOLDIERS and THE CARD PLAYER to me, but probably best known to you as Ser Davos from Game Of Thrones) who shows up mysteriously at a small-town Scottish police station where PC* Heggie (Pollyanna McIntosh, THE WOMAN herself!) has just arrived for her first night on the job. This is going to bode badly for everyone in the joint --the highly competent rookie, the tightly-wound sargent (Douglas Russell, VALHALLA RISING, making a great case for bigger roles here), the handful of assholes locked up in the downstairs jail, or the dickhead other cops who are no better than the prisoners. It’s one of those movies where everybody has a secret which is going to be dragged out of them by a malevolent trickster type character acting as a catalyst. Guess who that might be.

Cunningham is kinda a Lance Henriksen or Peter Cushing type actor, the sort of hard-working pro who will show up in your cheapie horror film and will always put in the effort to class things up. But I think he makes a miscalculation here by underplaying the drifter character, offering a restrained performance laced with quiet menace instead of a mustache-twirling hammy one. It’s a good performance, of course --I don’t think he’s capable of anything else-- but probably not the right one for this movie. The general tone here is not one which lends itself well to quiet intimations; it mostly oscillates between over-the-top misery porn and over-the-top splattercore. These are two distinct impulses which don’t necessarily work together all that comfortably, but the one thing they have in common is that they’re not subtle. Everything here is cranked up about as loud and on-the-nose as it can go. These can’t just be ordinary asshole cops, they have to be corrupt, sexed-up, drug-taking, suspect-beating, gleefully murderous cops. The drunken asshole in the can can’t just be a irresponsible lout, he’s got to be a cartoonish parody of smirking juvenile delinquency. Any little detail the movie can settle on is going to be pushed to its most outrageous limit. I mean, look at the silly, nonsensical pun in the film’s title, for God’s sake! This is no place for nuance.

Unfortunately, Cunningham’s character doesn’t seem to have gotten that memo, which is a problem since he ought to to be the focal point here. Everyone else is louder, but they add up to less. That leaves the beginning of the film feeling a little flat, a workable premise in search of an organizing vision. And that leaves you ample brainpower to consider that it’s also pretty derivative of a million other low-budget movies with a premise sort of like this (the crappy 2010 Val Kilmer movie THE TRAVELER has nearly the exact same premise, right down to the police station setting). It’s not bad, exactly, just kinda dumb and predictable and middling.

But. The film keeps having little flashes of weirdness that hint at a director who is more inclined towards EVIL DEAD cartoonish mayhem than the didactic, gloomy screenplay would imply. One character is revealed to have killed his family, which is the standard thing that would happen in any movie like this. But would another movie have us visit the home to find that he’s lopped off the top of his son’s skull and propped up his exposed brain in front of the TV? Would another movie have a different character who turns out to have a fridge full of dismembered body parts in plastic bags? Granted, these bits are staged with a bunch of irritating avid farts and speed-ramping nonsense, but that’s an instinct for glorious overkill in a movie which otherwise seems to be written with an eye toward bleakness rather than goofy bad taste. They’re gone just as quickly as they arise, though, and the movie returns to being a more sober and responsible (and not-especially-insightful) examination of guilt, and you might be tempted to assume these are just odd little aberrations, not statements of intent.

Fortunately, the bad taste wins in the end, because (vague spoilers) right as the movie starts to become unbearably tiresome in its rote moralizing flashbacks, suddenly someone shows up out of fuckin’ nowhere bare-chested and wrapped in bloody barbed wire with a shotgun, and a bunch of aggro-electronic dance music starts cranking up, and it turns into a deliciously over-the-top bloodbath for the final 20 minutes or so. It’s idiotic, of course, but it’s also much more honest about what it wants to be than the run-up, as evidenced by the guy who gets dealt moral retribution via the medium of a shotgun blast to the dick. This is clearly much closer to director O’Malley’s speed than all the ominous chit-chat that lards up the front half of his film, and he digs into it with such obvious gusto that you can hardly help but be delighted by it, if seeing a crazy guy wrapped in barbed wire graphically murdering a police station full of assholes is something that you might enjoy. Obviously I, for one, fall into this category. Once that’s done with (and yes, of course there’s a huge fireball at the end, do you even have to ask?) there’s even a cheerfully ridiculous twist ending which finally allows Cunningham and McIntosh (who also plays things pretty straight) a little more room to ham it up and have some fun. I approve.

Anyway, I’d hesitate to call this a good one, exactly; there’s way too much clichéd and obvious nonsense weighing down the front end, and the movie’s “ooh, this is dark!” pretensions are about at the level of a particularly unimaginative Insane Clown Posse number. And even its better instincts towards over-the-top carnage don’t sit well with some of its more grounded (but still asinine) subplots about domestic abuse and fucking child rape. The movie wants to go way over the line in every direction, but your ability to enjoy the better parts might depend on your tolerance for its decision to also go pretty extreme (though less graphic, thankfully) with the more depressing stuff. If you can’t get past that, well, you’re probably a better person than I am, but if they ever made a movie about a crazed shotgun killer wrapped in bloody barbed wire that couldn’t win me over, I ain’t met it yet. I feel a little weird telling someone “hey, this movie is a total hoot if you can get past the boring part and the child rape!” but I guess that’s what I have to do here. Hopefully that will give O’Malley the confidence he needs to ditch the clutter and embrace his inner trashiness the next time he steps behind the camera. The world doesn’t really need a lot more stagey faux-intellectual indie horror morality plays, but we are always badly in need of gleefully irresponsible bloodbaths. And I think this guy’s got exactly the right mix of boisterous tastelessness to deliver one.

*In the UK, PC means “Police Constable,” not, “It is literally white genocide that I can’t tell racist jokes in public without people getting mad at me.”

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	Darkness Shall Rise
TITLE ACCURACY	Totally meaningless
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	No
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	UK/ Ireland
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Whatever the one is where some mysterious stranger shows up and turns everyone against each other by revealing their evil secrets. Does that setup have a name? I feel like it ought to.
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Liam Cunningham, Pollyanna McIntosh
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Cunningham is always followed around by a bunch of crows, but they never get involved in the action
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Oh yeah.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Nah
VOYEURISM?	None, unless you wanna count the Santa-Claus like implications of supernatural figures who know your darkest secrets.
MORAL OF THE STORY	It’s probably for the best that British cops don’t carry guns.

I don't think I can quite push this into four-thumb territory, but it's close. Think C+ / B-