Rites of Spring (2011) - 2.5/4

Since time immemorial, plucky blondes have been known to be disasterous for harvests. That's why they had to be sacrificed to crop gods all the world over. Or at least given entry-level secretarial positions. Jump forward hundreds of years, and we have all but forgotten the wisdom of our forefathers. Now plucky blondes appear in board rooms, vote in senates, and even write movie reviews.

The Rites of Spring begins with a failed harvest of sorts. A blonde (Anessa Ramsey) has cost the corporation that employs her $10 million. The boss has no idea who was responsible for the blunder, so he's fired some others whom he either appreciates less or wants to fuck less. Before she can confess her mistake to save her colleagues, she's kidnapped and taken to a barn, where an old man tortures her and her friend. Meanwhile, the stooges who got fired plan a heist to kidnap the boss's daughter and get $2 million in ransom. Their desperate plan takes them somewhere in the woods not far from where the blonde kidnapper has taken her. She escapes and finds her colleagues, but something much worse than the old guy is following her.

Rites of Spring begins with that intricate bit of plotting, which serves the dual purpose of giving us a lot of assholes we want murdered and not boring us during the exposition phase. Maybe there's a comment in there on the persistance of old-time harvest values in modern society or karma and consequences or something. I don't know. What it does is launch us into the real meat of the movie, which is somewhere between a slasher and a creature feature.

Here Rites of Spring is only moderately successful. The blonde is just plucky enough for you to care about her survival and the creature is just dangerous enough to make you fear for her safety. The basic mechanics work. However, giving the creature a blade to kill with really takes away from his creature-ness. And his creature powers make him such a formidable slasher, that it's hard to buy the blonde has enough pluck to get away--we're talking astronomical levels of pluck.

The creature's purpose and significance, and its relationship to the old man are all sources of intrigue that drew me into the film. Perhaps these were the most interesting aspects of the film, in fact. Far more interesting than who was double-crossing whom in the heist subplot. Yet, in the abrupt ending, I realized I knew more about the heist than the creature and old man. All we do know is it has something to do with the harvest. Is the creature the shambling personification of winter, the death that must come before the harvest? Or is it just a zombie with a scythe? Or is it a real harvest deity that needs plucky blonde blood? What radius does its harvest goodness spread once it's been given some delicious girl meat? We never find out.

Overall, Rites of Spring is a decent indepent horror flick, more ambitious and much better executed that the majority of its kind. About half way along, unfortunately, the more interesting aspects of the film seem abandoned to easy, cheap slashing and horror movie cliches, suggesting filmmaker Padraig Reynolds forgot the wisdom of our forefathers and did not sacrifice his plucky blonde.

Hemlock Grove (2013) - 2.5/4

Hemlock Grove is yet another werewolf-and-vampire-based series, this one peculiar in being produced exclusively for Netflix. The directorial talent featured is primarily Eli Roth (Hostel) and Deran Sarafian (Interzone), two directors I like very much. That bodes well. But with TV or web series, it's not the direction so much as the writing that matters. In Hemlock Grove's case, the very promising content is consistently weakened by its sloppy writing.

Hemlock Grove is the titular small town where some girls are getting murdered by a mysterious animal that eats their genitals, chews them in half, and leaves their parts around town. Just before this starts happening, a gypsy boy and his mom, clearly werewolves of some sort, move to town arousing old enmity with the town's rich-folk, the Godfreys. The Godfreys, for their part, are clearly vampires of some sort and owners of a mysterious medical facility where god-knows-what experiments take place. Over the course of the episodes, these families draw together somewhat against a mutual enemy. Who could it be?

The plot and style of Hemlock Grove perhaps bares some superficial comparison to Twin Peaks. You have an ordinary town in which some murders begin to occur and the oddness of these people become manifest. HG is nowhere near is skillful as TP, however. Rather than slowly drawing us into the mysteries of these people, like you get in Twin Peaks, our face is rubbed into their perversion or oddness in the first episode. Flashbacks come fast and free early on, giving us full family histories. Content that should be meted out over several episodes is dropped wholesale upon us without mystery or intrigue.

The characters, for their part, prove far too mercurial. Some of them, like the Godfreys, begin so unpleasant in the first episode or two that their characters are essentially worthless for the plot. So the writers conveniently ignore all that was set up in the first episode to make them relatively affable people. This is particularly the case with one of the main characters, Roman Godfrey, the troubled badboy who becomes a sweetheart pal of gypsy Peter. Roman's mother, Olivia (Famke Janssen), probably the most heinous character in the series, suddenly becomes just as kind and compassionate. That's bad writing. They needed slow, careful development.

Even worse writing takes over in the final two or three episodes. A climax and resolution are necessary, but the writers have so written themselves into a corner that several uses of a deus ex machina are made to get out. Disappointments ensue as characters never reach the dramatic or ironic conclusions their development suggest--they just kind of evaporate.

The actors chosen are another problem. The veteran cast, namely Famke Janssen, Dougray Scott, and Lili Taylor are all fantastic, bringing to life characters that could have come across as very bland (Peter's mom) or belabored (Roman's mom). Kaniehtiio Horn as the perptually-in-hot-pants fortune-teller Destiny is the only young cast-member to hold her own with the elders. In terms of look and performance, Bill Skarsgard and Calvin-Klein-reject Landon Laboiron are just fine, their accents aside. But they lack chemistry that they really needed to make the buddy aspect of the series work. With the dialogue they had to work with, they aren't entirely to blame. But whomever we blame, without that sense of their fraternal connection, the emotional backbone of the series is an arthritic mess. Peter's and Roman's friendship is really the series core; it's too bad no-one making the series realized this.

These problems aside, there is a lot to like in Hemlock Grove for the horror fan. The werewolf transformation sequence is great. The various subplots introduce a multitude of oddities, from virgin births and mad scientists to intenstine-eating and glowing mutants. There are also some great gore effects. Some fun splashes of perversion. There are, moreover, far more questions than there are ever answers, which the final episode only makes worse. So, if you liked the series so far, there's probably more to come.

The ABCs of Death (2012) - 2.5/4

The ABCs of Death has perhaps drawn more attention due to its sheer breadth of directorial talent than due to the formalist conceit. With 26 geek-gen directors involved, it was hard not to run into the title while browsing IMDb. The conceit itself is a fairly familiar 'brainstorming' technique: choose a letter of the alphabet, a word that starts with that letter, then base a work of fiction off that word. Each of the 26 directors was given this freedom, with the condition only that the short they produce contain a death. Needless to say, there's little consistency and one has to be ready to be surprised, pleasantly or not.

The overall experience of ABCs of Death is the major triumph of the film. Critiquing the individual shorts, an activity I will briefly partake in below, is itself a part of the ABCs of Death experience and one of its most enjoyable aspects. ABCs brings the short film festival into your home and allows you to be the judge and jury--not so much the executioner, alas. You see 26 shorts, some of them brilliantly creative, some of them a waste of time, some of them just confusing, and you get to hurl the full rotten-fruit-basket that is your tastes at them. The more people you watch it with, the more fun this probably is.

In my case, I watched with my wife and we both agreed Malling's "H is for Hydro-Electric Diffusion," a Nazisploitation liveaction Furry sketch, was the most enjoyable and creative of the segments. That gets the Palme d'Or from our Living Room Cannes. We absolutely loathed "G is for Gravity" a lazy POV segment of a guy falling and drowning. From there, our tastes diverged. I loved "Y is for Youngbuck," an oversaturated dreamscape of blaring '80s keyboards and abused trust, but she thought it was foolish. She liked Xavier Gens' "X is for XXL," which I thought trite. I thought "W is for WTF" was extremely enjoyable and certainly lived up to its chosen 'word,' but for her cinematic headfuck she preferred "R is Removed," which I found a little too pompous.

The sheer variety of styles and content ensures you will find a few shorts you enjoy, a few you don't mind, and a few you hate. There are some avant-garde shorts, like the French-produced smugness of "O is for Orgasm," some animation like Morganthaler's tedious "K is for Klutz," comedy like Yamaguchi's amusing "J is for Jidai-geki," highly ambitious epics like "V is for Vagitus," and throw-away vignettes like Angela Bettis's "E is for Exterminate."

If there is anything consistent about ABCs of Death other than death, it is a peculiar obsession with toilets and what goes on in them. Whether its Ti West's rubbish short about a miscarriage in a toilet, Hardcastle's toilet monster, or Iguchi's tale of a lady absorbed into fart-heaven, most of these directors equated creative freedom with dick- and fart-jokes. The few that did not have earned my respect.

A week after seeing the film, I still find myself treasuring the experience. There is no other film like ABCs. Not yet, anyway. There are plenty of anthology films, but none that gives so much content. There'll be some significant rewatch value in revisiting some favorites and some forgottens. Ultimately, however, we can all make our own ABCs of Death by compiling a disk of shorts and may have just as much fun with it, if not more.

Prometheus (2012) - 3.5/4

Ridley Scott, like James Cameron, is a director I usually approach with low expectations. I am a shameless consumer of narrative; I enjoy a good story. Visuals must be of a highly spectacular nature to make me forget a terrible narrative. Scott and Cameron, however, care very little about narrative. Gladiator is all visual spectacle with a potboiler narrative matched by your average wrestling event. Yet, Scott spent $1,000,000 just to visually recreate the dead Oliver Reed for a 30-second scene. This is not quite a representation of Scott's style, however. Cameron is the meticulous obsessive. Scott is a visionary. He will sacrifice any element of his film to create enormous, visual impressions. Scott is about the cyclopean, the limits of imagination. He's not about the details, but the overwhelming, the truly awe-some.

So when Scott returned to his sci-fi roots in a supposed prequel to Alien (1979), I was for once very interested. He is peculiarly suited to sci-fi and Alien still impresses today. With Prometheus, Mr. Scott does not disappoint. The level of imagination and the visionary power displayed in this film are extremely rare, superseding even the previous Alien films in the sheer enormity and consistency of the vision. You could mute Prometheus and just look at it.

The story of Prometheus, to be fair to Scott, is actually decent. A nebulous corporation sends a team of thugs and scientists to investigate a planet fingered out in Irish archaeological digs. The world is desolate and the mysterious alien compound is filled with malevolent life. Our heroine is plucky and likeable, albeit no Ripley. The story's characters and trajectory seem almost intentionally cobbled together from sci-fi predecessors like Galaxy of Terror (1981) and Inseminoid (1981), and TV series Earth: Final Conflict (1997-2002). Stealing from the best isn't a bad strategy and these are very good films. Scott's laziness toward narrative is still showing, but this time he gets a pass.

The connection to the previous films in the Alien series is also intriguing. Any author or filmmaker takes a risk explaining their old work with a prequel. Alien was marked by the mysteriousness of its alien creature. Where it comes from, how such a creature thrives, is never really explained. Prometheus does explain its source, somewhat tenuously, and to its credit leaves more questions than answers. Even more to its credit, I find the new questions even more interesting than the old questions. Motif connections to previous Alien films also pleased me. It just isn't a real alien film without talking dismembered robot.

That said, the plot of Prometheus could have been abysmal and it wouldn't have mattered that much. Prometheus's visuals are awe-inspiring, even to the point of being mystical: One's self dissolves before them and is absorbed in their grandeur. Scott does not just create an amazing fictional planet or a cool-looking spaceship in this film. He does that, but he also creates layers of dream, technological projection, and past that superimpose over reality. He creates intense planetary storms, immense movements of structures the weight of which can be felt, new and strange alien creatures. He creates, using almost exclusively these visuals, that Lovecraftian emotion of human insignificance. That is a profound achievement. Ridley Scott at his best and sci-fi at its best.

Grabbers (2012) - 3/4

Making an independent, quirky horror-comedy that 'hits the right spot' is hard to do. More and more filmmakers try to do it, leaving more and more failures to wash onto our shores. Grabbers is another independent, quirky horror-comedy, this time from Ireland, and it's mostly a success.

The plot starts typically enough. A meteor, an island, a small town, and a hideous, tentacle monster from another planet, bake at 350 until golden brown. The fun quirk is that the locals--a charmingly grumpy alcoholic policeman, an uptight rookie from off-island, the village drunk, and a marine biologist--discover that the blood-sucking tentacle-beasts just can't hold their liquor. In fact, it kills them. So the village has to remain drunk while they take on the molusc menace.

The idea is great on its own. But it works especially well with its cast of characters. Each one, however insignificant to the overall plot, seems to have a fully fleshed-out personality. You almost imagine you could visit to island and see these people living there, unaware their encounter with space monsters was ever filmed. In fact, it's the characterizations of the supporting locals that are the most endearing.

As with many movies of this sort, the need to 'have a heart' and give us a coy romance has both advantages and disadvantages. Because--and only because--the characters are likeable, the romance is mildly charming and will put a smile on your mother's face. As a subplot in an already-packed, relatively short film, it is necessarily rushed, with little dramatic satisfaction as a consequence. I also think the need to include a romantic subplot when there isn't really time to develop it may come across as syrupy and ingratiating, which it is.

Also rushed is the pressure to reach a conclusion. The creatures are destroyed too easily as soon as the protagonists really have to get killing and have their big kiss. There is never any serious suspense, nor any serious monster mayhem--a shame given how well-designed the monsters are.

However, with such likeable characters, what screenwriter would want to do serious killing? The real fun with Grabbers is hanging out with these locals as they drunkenly struggle with tentacle monsters and their own personal issues. They're hilarious folk inhabiting a film with plenty of well-written jokes. No-one could go wrong visiting them once or twice and having a pint.