Burning Bright

Burning Bright (2010)

Dir. Carlos Brooks

Written by David Higgins, Christine Coyle Johnson, Julie Prendiville Roux

Starring Briana Evigan, Charlie Tahan, Garrett Dillahunt, cameo by Meat Loaf

Let’s start with the official IMDB plot summary for this movie:

“A thriller centered on a young woman and her autistic little brother who are trapped in a house with a ravenous tiger during a hurricane.”

Sit with that for a second. Sometimes you get an idea so perfect and elegant that you just have to sit back for a moment and let the greatness sink in. Really take your time with that. Luxuriate in it. I mean, how many more times in your life as you going to hear something so utterly delightful?

That’s usually as far as you can go, though, because it seems like you hardly ever see such a perfect concept actually faithfully put on the screen. Usually if it ends up on-screen at all, it’s muddied up with a lot of needless plot clutter or smirking postmodern jokiness. But not so here. BURNING BRIGHT, whatever its flaws may be, is 100% committed to its moronic vision. I mean let's be honest, this has to be one of the most sublimely idiotic premises for a movie I’ve ever heard, yet it’s presented here with an uncommonly dedicated focus, and with absolutely no irony whatsoever.

The result, far from being a hilarious trainwreck, turns out to be sort of OK, even mildly effective at times. They seem to mostly use a real tiger (three tiger actors, actually) which is obviously better than CG even if it’s clearly not in the same shot as the actors a lot of the time. The performances are all quite good, and even the dialogue is pretty acceptable for something this lowbrow. It’s a real movie in absolutely every way except that it’s about a hot girl in her underwear protecting her autistic brother from a rampaging tiger (which Meat Loaf had previously described as “pure evil”) while they’re trapped in a house during a hurricane. I mean, it’s DIE HARD meets CUJO with a RAIN MAN twist.

It’s ridiculous and gimmicky, but really the biggest problem is that it’s not quite ridiculous and gimmicky enough. Once you commit to the idea of a tiger stalking these kids, you might as well go whole hog and really think up some wacky shit for it to do. The movie has a little of that (the standout is a bravura sequence with our heroine trapped in a laundry shoot with the tiger below) but not quite enough to really be a wholly satisfying genre ride. Too much perfunctory stalking, not enough whammy to add up to a killer tiger DIE HARD ripoff as great as the world deserves. I want to see her throw a saddle on the thing and ride it to freedom. I want to see her entice a friendly wildebeest to join forces. I want to see the tiger cleverly disguise itself as a blanket-covered futon couch and then spring at its helpless prey when they collapse into it in exhaustion. I mean, let’s get a little more creative here people. We’ve already crossed the threshold of ridiculousness with this fundamental premise. Might as well have a little fun now that we’re here.

Anyway, this one should probably be either better or worse, but since this is what we got, well, at least it delivers what it promises at a basic level. One last thing of note: unlike INTERSTELLAR this one doesn’t need to read the titular William Blake poem The Tyger five whole times to you before they’re convinced you’ll get it. In fact, they somehow manage to resist reading it at all, so they correct that mistake on the special features. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Briana Evigan (STEP UP, STEP UP 2 DA STREETS, SORORITY ROW, various music videos including Linkin Park, Flo Rida, T-Pain and Enrique Iglesias) read Blake’s classic poetic meditation on aesthetic beauty contrasted with primal ferocity. I think this is quite frankly a marvelous idea, and I hope it catches on so much that every DTV horror cheapie feels compelled to include a special feature of their sexy 20-something star reading a classic English poem (not on camera, but with the words printed on a stately black background, presumably for poetry karaoke). You know, you could get David Boreanaz reading Rudyard Kipling’s immortal Gunga Din on the 20th-edition special release of THE CROW IV: WICKED PRAYER, or Tara Reid doing T.S. Elliot’s The Wasteland on the Criterion version of URBAN LEGEND. Paris Hilton reading Ode to A Grecian Urn on the 3D 2-disc version of HOUSE OF WAX REMAKE. And so on. If so, BURNING BRIGHT is going to end up being one of those movies you read about in film class* that we all have to pretend to like because it was the first. Until then, I guess we’ll have to content ourselves merely enjoying it for unapologetically being itself.

*I was trying to think of an example of this phenomenon, but I dunno, I think maybe I’ve just been drinking the Kool-Aide too long because I actually enjoy most of the movies I used to accuse of falling into this category. KING KONG, THE MUMMY, etc. Maybe BIRTH OF A NATION?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2014 CHECKLIST!

The Hunt For Dread October

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: It'd be cool if it was billed as a direct adaptation of Blake's poem, but no, it actually took three people to come up with this story.
• SEQUEL: Not yet
• REMAKE: None
• FOREIGNER: No
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: None
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: None
• BOOBIES: Nope
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Some mauling near the end, off-screen though cuz it's PG-13.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: Well, haunted by a Tiger.
• MONSTER: No. There's a suggestion at the beginning that the Tiger may be some sort of evil tiger, but that never seems to be supported by the events of the movie.
• THE UNDEAD: None
• POSSESSION: No, that would be rad, though. I wonder if that's what happened to the Naked Tiger Dancer from VAMPIRE CIRCUS?
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): Yes, and not just the tiger.
• EVIL CULT: No
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: No
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Mid, I guess? I sure never heard of it.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: (SPOILERS!) Just fucking murder your step-kids yourself you lazy bastard, don’t send a tiger to do an evil step-parent’s job.
• TITLE ACCURACY: Accurately reflects the Tiger element, and in fact the Tiger even catches on fire briefly, though "bright" might be stretching it.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: She did, though rather grumpily if memory serves.

Thale

Thale (2012)

Dir. and written by Aleksander L. Nordaas

Starring Silje Reinåmo, Erlend Nervold, Jon Sigve Skard

PRINCE AVALANCHE* with elves, only less so. Two cleaning workers who specialize in gruesome postmortem body removal (often using sponges instead of stretchers) stumble upon a mysterious hidden room in an abandoned house. Leo (Jon Sigve Skard) is stoic to the point of catatonic fugue, Elvis (Erlend Nervold) is a bit greener (especially around liquified human remains) and is just generally unbelievably incompetent, demonstrating poor decision-making skills that would make Darby Crash drop his jaw. So these are probably not the two best people to be dealing with a situation which increasing looks pretty sinister, particularly when it becomes obvious that the previous owner of the house has been keeping someone locked up in a hidden room for quite a long time, with the intention of performing bizarre medical experiments (what is this, a TUSK prequel?). And even more so when the subject of said experiments (Silje Reinåmo, “Ms. Calabash” in BRATZ: THE MOVIE?) suddenly appears, naked and alive, out of a vat of milky mystery liquid.

This is a cool scenario, and for a while it produces a real nice, subtle creepy tension. Just what the fuck is going on here? What the hell have these know-nothings stumbled into here, and what are the consequences going to be? Gradually, we learn more and more about the mystery woman (named Thale) who just may be one of the legendary huldra of Scandinavian folklore. But how did she come to be imprisoned in this hidden laboratory? Inquiring minds want to know. With a premise this strange and sordid, the film can afford to linger a little and build suspense.

Unfortunately, it does more than linger a little; it positively loiters, and the absolutely glacial pace dulls the urgency of the mystery quite a bit. There may be a right time to incessantly linger menacingly in slow motion on people’s faces while Enya knockoff music plays, but that time is not the entire first hour of an enticing mystery. Eventually it becomes painfully clear that this is merely an intriguing premise with no intention of actually building to anything. Even at a barely feature-length 76 minutes, there’s simply not enough narrative here to sustain a whole film. It just ends up being unforgivably uneventful, and a late-in-the-game twist undermines a lot of the sinister setup anyway. Towards the very end, something finally happens, and there are even a couple laudably fun kills, but it’s not nearly enough to excuse the time wasted before it.

It’s a shame, too, because there’s a lot to like. Director Nordaas creates a wonderfully perverse atmosphere, bursting with real-world grime and menacing detail work**. The acting is quite good across the board, and there’s a nice sense of pitch-black deadpan Norwegian humor, particularly at the beginning. And of course, there’s no denying that this is a great, totally unique premise. Everything here is genuinely well-done and even laudable, except there’s just not enough of it to comprise a feature length film. Edit this down to a workable 20 minute short, though, and you might have something genuinely special. It’s neat to see some new ideas for horror premises, especially when they touch on folklore and cultural customs we don’t see on film all that often, but hopefully for his next movie Nordaas remembers to include a story and not just a setup.

*Or EITHER WAY, if you want to go the original Norwegian route.

**And for a reported cost of a palty $10,000 bucks, the movie looks better than most movies with literally hundreds of times that budget.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2014 CHECKLIST!

The Hunt For Dread October

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No
• SEQUEL: None.
• REMAKE: Nope
• FOREIGNER: Norwegian Import
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None.
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: None.
• BOOBIES: Yes, much nudity
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No.
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Tail removed.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: Huldra attack!
• THE UNDEAD: No
• POSSESSION: No
• SLASHER/GIALLO: None
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): Nah
• EVIL CULT: No
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: No dolls
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Yes, via surgery
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: High, tiny budget Norwegian import
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Never hire this incompetent fucking cleaning company.
• TITLE ACCURACY: A creature named Thale, check.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: Indeed she did!

Vampire Circus

Vampire Circus (1972)

Dir. Robert Young

Written by Judson Kinberg

Starring Adrienne Corri, Anthony Higgins, Laurence Payne, John Moulder-Brown, etc, and also David Prowse is in there.

As we painfully learned in DRACULA: A.D. 1972, by 1972 Hammer was not doing so hot. They had been a boundary-pushing hit machine back in the late 50s and through the 60s, firing up horror fans with then-shocking violence and lurid sexuality that shook the genre out of its corny 1950’s funk. But by 1972, times had changed. THE WILD BUNCH and BONNIE AND CLYDE had already pushed the boundaries of violence far beyond what the British censors would allow, to say nothing of the competition from indie schlockmeisters like Roger Corman and Herschell Gordon Lewis and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and like, literally the entire nation of Italy. Hammer’s gothic, stagey style seemed embarrassing and dated, and the studio was in financial trouble, desperate for a new audience. Soon, they would be cranking out awful tripe like SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA and the martial-arts head-scratcher THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES which would conclusively demonstrate that chasing newfangled trends leads to utter failure.

But, just before the slow, final disintegration really began, we got this, arguably the last Hammer film that really felt like classic Hammer.* It’s gonna check most of the boxes you’d want from a Hammer Horror classic: Period setting, slow build, mysterious atmosphere, baroque but stagy sets, sexual taboo, a bucket or two of red stuff, a British B-movie actor who would later be in STAR WARS. It has that uniquely Hammer feeling of being classy and a bit uptight while still being trashy and exploitive. How do they always pull that off? Leave it to the Brits to make bloody, button-pushing sexually deviant horror feel like it comes with a polite apology.

You will never know happiness like this.

Anyway, what we got here is the story of the shithole little town in 19th century Austria which is for some reason peopled entirely by townsfolk with aristocratic British accents. In a scenario ripped from today’s headlines, they’re having some problems with the local government, in this case an insane Vampiric Count who lives in an evil castle and steals people’s wives and children for his twisted sexual pleasure/blood fetish/food source. That’s not gonna fly with the local peasants, so they storm the castle, stake the bastard, kill everyone inside, and burn the ruins for good measure. Our somewhat-protagonist, local schoolteacher Everyman Q. Müller (Laurence Payne, in his last film role before he retired to become a crime novelist) is down with the regime change, but not so comfortable with all the murder, particularly since his wife was one of the Count’s sexual conquests recently and (even though she’s completely unrepentant) he’d prefer not to see her whipped to death by a mob. He negotiates her release, and she flees into the night.

 And that’s that, right? I mean, it’s not like you can bring a Vampiric count back to life by sacrificing a certain number of the children of the people who killed him, right? And even if you could, it’s not like our recently departed villain had relatives and friends who would eventually return to town as part of a traveling circus of evil in order to do it. And even in the unlikely event that both those things were to somehow happen against all odds, you could always just leave town and escape. I mean, unless there were a plague or something and the town was quarantined by  Austrian soldiers at gunpoint. Which would be so outrageously unlikely you might as well just dismiss the possibility, I don’t even know why I mentioned it in the first place.

The cool thing about this concept is the Circus itself, which is full of nifty stuff. Although this particular vampire circus is indeed on a rescue mission, if this is a cover they really sunk some time into making it seem legit. You got a crazy awesome dwarf carnival barker, David Prowse as a strongman, these acrobat twins who also do magic**, a guy who can turn into a black panther, a naked tiger woman dancer unrelated to the panther guy. Although I guess they’re out to revenge themselves on the townspeople and steal their children and/or blood, they also put on a pretty good show. If you’re going to steal their blood, always leave ‘em with a smile, I always say. Their show is smaller and less flashy than you might imagine, but that kind of fits with the dirt-farming, plague-stricken, superstitious desperation of the time. Even when your wives aren’t being penetrated by aristocratic Eurotrash vampires, it doesn’t look like 19th century Austria is a very fun place to live. You can genuinely see how even this small-time 3-cart circus would be the talk of the town, a window of a more promising outside world which they so rarely get a glimpse of.

I don't know what you call this, but I'm obviously in favor of it.

I think that’s the most interesting thing about the movie. Yes, the circus gimmick is fun, but you’ve seen that done more elaborately elsewhere so it’s not quite the hook it might have been. Moreover, I’m quite of the opinion that circus horror works better when it exaggerates the already surreal, vaguely grotesque qualities of this age-old institution, and here they play it (mostly) pretty literal and straight. These classic Hammer films tend to have a pretty restrained style, so even though it’d be fun to go full-on FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS on this evil circus, it ain’t gonna happen here. But the movie has something more interesting going on in its Hobbesian portrayal of this world of poverty, ignorance, and death. These are desperate, brutal times these people are living in, where brutality and mortality are the rule instead of the exception. Although we’re shown that the Count in question is pretty much an awful asshole, the lynch mob of villagers who show up to murder him and whip his lady friends to death don’t seem much better. So when the Vampire Circus shows up to settle the score, you can’t really get too mad at them for it. In fact, even though they’re a bunch of supernatural bloodsucking carnies, they are also shown to be intensely loyal to each other, and honestly come across about as sympathetically as the townsfolk. I almost wonder if setting this in 19th-century Austria is a way of telling us that this is not exactly a fight between good and evil, but more like an example of the kind of petulant tribalism that would eventually plunge Eastern Europe --and the whole world-- into so many senseless wars and conflicts over a bunch of meaningless nonsense.

Even if not, the film has an interesting kind of nihilism about its characters and their motives. Müller, for example, spares his wife from an awful death at the beginning, even after she’s spurned him. But it ends up not working out so good for everyone, and the purveyors of the Vampire Circus requires a somewhat more blunt approach. The movie doesn’t exactly condemn his act of mercy, it merely assures the audience that he will not be rewarded for it. This kind of bleakness is pretty unusual, even for a horror movie. It adds up to a startlingly gloomy and hopeless world, where we can little expect good deeds to be repaid in kind, nor villainous ones punished, but instead expect horrible and arbitrary misfortune at any moment with no warning or logic to it.

The village, incidentally, attributes its long string of bad luck to a curse by the vampiric Count, as a result of their having, you know, killed him before he got a chance to bone every last one of their women and a selection of the less hirsute men. And there seems to be every indication that this is a correct interpretation of the facts! Normally a curse in a horror movie is the result of having genuinely wronged someone, a gypsy probably, and having that particular wrongdoing continue to haunt you. Not this time though; you can either accept vampiric ravaging of women or you can deal with the curse, and also fuck you. Pretty harsh.

The only problem I really have with the movie is the Count who causes all these problems to begin with. First off, his name is Count Mitterhaus, which makes him sound like a Nazi CPA. Secondly, just look at him:

Derp.

This is the guy who causes all this fuss? He looks like the brunette cousin of that creepy white hairdresser from GOOD HAIR. Let’s have some higher standards, women of 19th century Austria.

Obviously, this would make a lot more sense.

Anyway, nice to have one last waltz with Hammer before the final curtain. Of course --just like any vampire-- they refused to stay dead, and managed a minor comeback in the late 2000s. In retrospect, I’m still glad I sacrificed all those children to resurrect them, but even pretty decent horror movies like the Potter-enhanced WOMAN IN BLACK and the icky WICKER MAN take-off WAKE WOODS don’t quite capture that unique Hammer-ness the studio had back in its heyday. But hey, as Hammer itself learned in the 80’s, sometimes it’s better to not try to be something specific, but just to be what you are. Sometimes, if you get really lucky, what you are will synch up with where the world is. And sometimes you’re born in a 19th Century Austrian village ruled by a sex-crazed doofus vampire count. Hey, win some, lose some.

* FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL being the other possible contender for that title, though it's from 1974 and noticeably cheaper than this one, where some small modicum of Hammer's trademark faux-opulence is still on display.

**One of them, incidentally, is Lalla Ward, now married to Richard Dawkins. I wonder what he thinks of this movie?