VFX share

I came across this neat video showing a break down of some of the visual effects from Black Swan which I thought was really interesting. There were so many effects in that film so it's cool to get an idea of how some of them were accomplished. Just in case you're also interested!

I Spit on Your Remake. All over it.

I can't wait to tear into this one. 

The other night we sat down to watch the remake of the 1978 I Spit on Your Grave. When I first heard that they were remaking this film, besides thinking it was totally unnecessary to remake it, I figured Hollywood would find some way to fuck it up and completely miss the mark. And guess what, they sure did. They did everything that they could do to try to top the original film- releasing it uncut right away to try to achieve some shock value and focusing way too much on creating Jigsaw worthy, intricate kills that are purely there for the gross-out factor that the Saw generation of kids has come to expect. A waste of time if you ask me.

Steven R. Monroe directs the 2010 remake of I Spit on Your Grave and it's not surprising to find that he's most known for camera operation and has mostly just directed TV movies (what you might call, a director for hire). This remake follows the same basic plot as the original- Jennifer (Sarah Butler) is a writer who comes to a remote cabin, deep in the southern backwoods, to get away from the city life and write her next novel. Unfortunately for her, she catches the eye of a nasty group of male locals who pursue her and proceed to rape and beat her in an extremely gratuitous fashion. She escapes and gets her revenge.

I'm really not even sure where to start with this one. First of all, I didn't get anything out of Sarah Butler's portrayal of Jennifer. She was a weak character, one that they overplayed as flaky and somewhat mindless. The supposed character development that much of the first part of the film  focuses on really showed us nothing more than some typical city girl that's clumsy, naive and probably only capable of writing Confessions of a Shopaholic during her writing retreat. I don't feel anything for her which immediately makes the film feel pointless. There's nothing interesting or at all special about her or her mediocre performance. This made all the rape scenes just feel like the most base kind of exploitation, rape for the sake of entertainment, and to set up for some overly explicit kill scenes. That was what made this film feel so wrong and off base with the original. It misses the point of exploitation films of 70s and takes it a step too far and in the wrong direction.

We are then somehow lead to believe that this girl, after being quite abusively raped, was able to jump into freezing cold water, fully nude, and hold her breath long enough to swim completely out of sight of her captors. It would be pretty impressive for anyone to do that in peak physical form but after the exhaustion of what had just happened to her, just minutes before, that's pretty goddamn amazing. This is where all the terrible plot holes start coming in to play. In the original, they leave her to go back to her cabin in her beaten down and degraded state and make no mention of killing her because it isn't really necessary. They show her going back and cleaning herself up, dealing with what just happened to her and becoming stronger so that she can get her revenge. This takes about a day and is pretty effective in my opinion. Now in this remake, we don't see what happens to her for a while. A whole month in fact. Uh, right. Instead we get an overly drawn out look at the lives of these detestable men in what I guess is an attempt to make us loathe them even more which, trust me, was pretty easy when we saw them raping her. So basically, this girl, who can't even hold her phone without dropping it in the toilet, was able to somehow survive in the woods for an entire month, living off what they briefly allude to as rats that she caught herself (oh yeah and apparently she can catch fish with her bare hands...), and somehow procuring some clean new clothes. Hell, she could have walked all the way home in that time! All of this defies all possibility of belief and reality. I don't see how we are expected to believe that this girl is capable of any of this when we're given such a poor definition of her character in the beginning. That destroys the effect of the film and is what makes it feel so gratuitous and unredeeming.

The original film is all about drawing everything out, every shot and every scene, making it feel realistically voyeuristic and making you really feel everything- her torture, her rape and her revenge. This remake is drawn out in all the wrong places. Way too much time is spent focusing on the men in the movie and their sorry attempts at portraying believable country boys. Our lead asshole looked like something out of a jeans ad, you know, a really forced attempt at styling a city boy to make him look country. I also couldn't get past that chubby guy who played the gay guy Damien in Mean Girls and his crappy attempt at a southern accent. They also decided to throw in a new character, the town Sheriff, who gets in on some of the rape action. They spend A LOT of time drawing out his story, showing his family life with his daughter, all to give our main character some weak leverage to get to him. Yeah we get it, it's supposed to be uncomfortable to watch him behaving normally at home with his wife and daughter when he enjoys going out and raping women, and she uses his daughter to get to him. But then we don't ever find out what she actually did with his daughter and she doesn't even use her in some way in front of him which I think, would have been more effective. Instead, she had to do something overly elaborate, which brings me to the revenge kills.

What was so great about the original was the smart and effective ways that she went about killing the men and how much you could feel her pain from what they caused her. Not only that, they were simple. In this remake however, they've fallen into Saw/Hostel territory. Though yes, they are some pretty exceptionally gross and cruel kills, I give them that, but I just couldn't get over the improbability of them all. It also didn't help that they kept throwing cheesy one-liners for her to say that pushed this film further and further into cheesy, torture porn caliber film making. And even though they were trying so hard to think of the outlandishly clever and ironic kill schemes, I was bored watching them and waiting for her to carry each one of them out in her petty, unsatisfying way. They spent too much time trying to make her scary looking, using typical, used-up imagery like long dark hair hanging in front of her face and making her look dirty and menacing. She's not supposed to be Samara from The Ring, she's supposed to be a broken down woman who's angry, not demonic. It completely cheapened any humanity and pain that Jessica had to begin with, therefore canceling out any attempt this film ever made at female empowerment or really any point at all.

I went into watching this film very openly and I really tried to give it a chance but it just didn't deliver. I think that when you're remaking a movie, solely for the purpose of trying to make more brutal rape and torture scenes, something has been lost and doesn't feel right. Some of my favourite modern horror films are some of the most disturbing (Martyrs, A Serbian Film) but they have a point, an underlying message in them that makes the violence justifiable and significant. This film just gives audiences an excuse to indulge in some guilt-free sadism that no matter how hard they tried, really isn't justifiable.

"Jesus is just a guy who cuts my lawn."

Been on a bit of TV watching rampage recently, which means watching the first two seasons of Sons of Anarchy in two days...Needless to say, we're obsessed. I enjoy finding a new TV series to watch that's actually decent and somewhat engaging. What is there not to like about about a TV show about bikers? Actually, I'm sure a lot of people could come up with a whole list of reasons. Though it can be a little overly American at times, perhaps a bit misogynistic and lately, there's been a little too much religion, I still love it. Awesome cast, interesting characters (actually some of the most interesting characters you can get on TV), exciting plot lines, violence, Irish accents- there's a lot to like! The last episode we saw was so tense it actually had me sweating. I'm so involved now, I can't wait to watch more.

Besides that, James has started on my intro to Westerns. I've seen the odd Western on TV and am a fan of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Giant (which is more of an epic romance-style western) but never any of the classics, and certainly no Clint Eastwood films. So we started with A Fistful of Dollars and I really liked it. I've discovered how much I love the look of old westerns, the sweeping, barren landscapes, riding around on horses (which I've always loved, maybe because I'm a girl), leather boots and gun holsters, it's just all very cool. So I'm excited to watch the rest of the Sergio Leone set and take it from there.

Other than that, we recently watched City of the Living Dead, most of The Burbs (I may have fallen asleep...) and the piece of shit remake of I Spit on Your Grave which you will be hearing about very soon.

"Your mouth smells like a borscht"

"We're flesh, potential carcasses. If I go to the butcher, I'm always surprised for not being there instead of the beef."

As James and I generally like to look for films that push the boundaries of the grotesque and horrifying, just to see what will finally, truly gross us out (Salo I think has so far come the closest), we thought we'd give the infamous La Grande Bouffe a shot. It didn't exactly satisfy our appetite for shocking cinema but did offer an interesting take on wealthy European culture.

Director Marco Ferreri's scandalous 1973 film La Grande Bouffe (which can also be found under the title Blow-Out) scathingly addresses European conspicuous consumption and sociocultural issues. The film may seem a bit empty at first but it actually offers quite a bit of witty and somewhat subtle insight.

It follows the story of four middle-aged friends- Marcello the pilot (played by the wonderful Marcello Mastroianni), Phillipe the judge (Phillipe Noiret), Michel the television executive (Michel Piccoli) and Ugo the chef (Ugo Tognazzi). They decide to hole up in Phillipe's gorgeous Parisian villa for a gargantuan, non-stop feast. They hire some floozies to keep them company and invite the local school teacher Andrea (Andréa Ferréol), a plump and somewhat more sensual and healthy contrast to the other women, whom Phillipe proposes marriage to almost immediately. Their living is reduced to the most basic functions: eating, drinking, burping, sleeping, vomiting, fucking, pissing and shitting, with the men's ultimate goal of eating themselves to death.


The characters of the 4 men seem to personify power and the three manifestations of that ideology- justice (Phillipe), spectacle (Michel), food (Ugo) and adventure (Marcello). Their male sexuality is reduced to impotence, indifference and regression as their bodies begin to deteriorate as a result of the mass gorging. You will never see so much farting, humping and humping whilst farting done in such an artful way in cinema such as this. Marcello is a self proclaimed "sex maniac" and once all of the prostitutes leave, Andrea stays and proceeds to do all of the sleeping around...and all of the men in the house. Though it is unclear if she is sticking around simply to indulge herself or if she shares the same goal as the men, she stays around right until the very end.

What's unfortunate about this film is that it really lacks any semblance of a plot or back story and more so focuses on some rather drawn out bingeing, farting and rather unappealing looking sex. There isn't any apparent reason for any of these men to be doing all of this in the first place, we're just sort of led to chalk it up to mid-life listlessness and ennui with their rich-man lives. This makes it all feel sort of meaningless and is what left me feeling a little disappointed.



Ferreri does reveal their double-mindedness at points like when they are faced with the first death of the group and Michel finds himself uncontrollably weeping over the body. This also marks the point where most of the dark humor stops and you're left to endure the slow turmoil and melancholic descent of the rest of the characters. I really appreciated the subtle ways of showing the human-animal parallel, like how they placed the bodies of Marcello and Michel in the refrigerating room, their bodies occupying the same space as the animal carcasses, as Ugo, Phillipe and Andrea sat down to attempt to eat another meal in front of them. All of the sort of soul-crushing inevitability of the ending of this film is lightened just once more (well lightened in a, you know, very dark sort of way...) with Phillipe's death. This plump and somewhat breast obsessed man gorges himself to death at last by eating two enormous, tit-shaped mounds of pink pudding, complete with nipples! That to me was a great way to end the film and bring together all the dark wit and satire of the first part of the film. My other favourite scene, and definitely the most absurd, was when the toilet in Marcello's bathroom somehow erupts and showers him with a river of shit. Horrifying but hilariously played.

This film is just riddled with so many small details and pretty much every scene is open to interpretation, most likely leading to some existential meaning and view on the bourgeois. I think if it weren't for Ferreri's ability to lace the film with all of these clever allusions and intelligent black humor, it may not have been able to keep me watching for the entirety of it's nearly 2 and a half hour running time. I mean, there are only so many food fueled sex scenes one movie can sustain without a little more of a point. Did I find it shocking? No. Did I find it gross? Excessive eating tends to put me off food for a bit, but not long, and the thought of having sex with someone while they may possibly be soiling themselves is pretty nasty. So, a little bit, yes, but not very much. Overall, I'm still unsure as to how much I really liked the film. I still feel somewhat unsatisfied and think that perhaps curiosity draws people to the film a little more than it's substance. If you've watched Last Tango in Paris, La Maman et la Putain and even The Cook, the Theif, His Wife and Her Lover, then you should watch this film.


Oh, and a couple of random but interesting facts: the Chinese ambassador that we briefly meet when the men first arrive at the villa apparently happened to be just walking by during filming and put in the movie; the villa is now the Vietnamese Embassy; the actors apparently did a lot of real eating for their scenes in the film.

A tire...named Robert...

Could this actually be real?? I think I'm going to have to see this.

I've been having a lot of zombie dreams lately...

Just a quick update while I'm working on a couple of reviews. We've been doing a bit of movie watching lately and I've been doing A LOT of comic reading.What I've read through and started reading include:

 In terms of movies, we've watched: The Slime City Grindhouse Collection that I picked up a while ago (and intend to dedicated a future entry to it because it's ridiculous)
Phantasm (which I had actually never seen before)
Time Bandits (brilliant)
   Tenebre (currently reviewing)
   and True Grit which we watched last night that was also really good. So there shall be more to come very   soon!

"If your life had a face, I would punch it"

I just finished reading the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World comics and feel kind of sad, like I'm missing something now! I saw the movie when it came out and loved it and now, after reading the comic, I'm really impressed with how they translated it into film. Obviously there's a lot more to the characters and story in the comic, but I think that they condensed it into a 112 minute film effectively. The casting was pretty much perfect and they did such an amazing job of making the actor's look like the characters in the comic. There is also a really interesting making-of feature on the DVD that is worth checking out. I now feel the need to watch the movie again, to fulfill my new need for Scott Pilgrim.If you haven't already, read the comic and watch the film. Both are awesome. That's all.  

"It's easy to kill live people"

During some of my reading/research in one of the many horror magazines out there, I came across an article on the film Psychomania. Before I even read anything, I took one look at the bikers in the picture and asked James if he'd ever seen it. He hadn't and we were both shocked that neither of us had even heard of it before. We were immediately seduced by it's quirky charm and premise, and vowed to see it as soon as possible. Our viewing has finally occurred and we were quite enticed by what we saw.

Don Sharp directs the undeniably likeable 1973 euroshock, Psychomania (or The Death Wheelers) about "The Living Dead" biker gang who end up quite literally being just that. Tom Latham (Nicky Henson) is the leader of this fab gang, clad in embroidered leathers and some wicked matching skeleton helmets. The gang likes to pass their time playing chicken with highway motor vehiclists, driving in circles around 7 big stones (or witch burial rather) and driving through city squares and grocery stores, knocking things over.

Tom is a bad boy. He wears leather pants and has funny, Brian Jones-esque hair (Nicky Henson blames other roles for the hair but I think he dug it) and at the ripe age of 18, just isn't feeling satisfied with his life. He confesses to his girlfriend Abby, the nice one of the gang, that he wants to commit suicide and she tells him that she can't join his suicide pact because she has to help her mum with the shopping tomorrow. He also appears to have a short attention span because midway through their graveyard make-out session, he stops to snatch up a frog (and I do mean that literally). He takes it home to his mother (Beryl Reid) and her manservant Shadwell (George Sanders who ironically committed suicide before the film's release, claiming to be "bored", but sadly did not come back on a motorcycle) and tries to figure out it's relation to his family and bringing back the dead. Turns out his family are some sort of occultists and after getting trapped in a secret room in the house and having vague, frog related hallucinations, Tom learns the secret to coming back from the dead. Turns out all you have to do is really, truly believe you can come back. Hmm...why have I never thought of this? Oh yeah, and some sort of frog ornamented jewelry is also required.

Tom wastes no time in meeting his demise and drives himself off a bridge. Abby requests that his mother let the gang bury him their way, which is sitting upright on his bike in the grave (which was cool until you saw the gang out of their leather and in garish hippie attire, singing cheesy acoustic ballads and making floral wreaths). There was something about this that seemed vaguely familiar to me, that I just couldn't put my finger on. Turns out Lemmy from Motorhead must have been a fan of this film because he pays homage to it in their video for "Killed by Death". Anyway, back on point, Tom drives out of his grave, in the same perfect condition he was in before he died, hell-bent on wreaking havoc and taking lives. His gang decides to follow suit, jumping out of buildings and planes, riding in front of trucks, walking into the river donning chains and a speedo...Amazingly, only one or two chicken out right before death, even though most of their methods spare plenty of time for second thought before actually killing you. Abby however, is not so easily seduced by the idea. As the police close in on Tom and his undead comrades, Abby struggles with her will to live and her inexplicable love for Tom who, let's face it, is kind of a cold-hearted ass. She also picks the least fail-proof way to attempt to off herself. Can these evil forces be stopped or will idiotic romanticism win out?


Nicky Henson delivers a pretty solid lead as Tom, a rather spoiled and selfish outsider who just wants to live forever and mess with people as he pleases. George Sanders brought such a great sense of old-school sinister and macabre acting that made all of his scenes increasingly enjoyable. The rest of the gang all brought their own little quirks to this charming cast, each with a different, odder-looking British face than the next.


Psychomania isn't your typical film involving the undead. It isn't laden with gore and special effects, nor is it rampant with nudity or really much sexuality at all (seriously no boobs!). It instead utilizes the grainy 1970s cinematography that we know and love to set the tone of the film, with foggy moors and some simple live action stunts to the tune of an awesomely psychedelic soundtrack by John Cameron. That, paired with the colourful characters and the aforementioned bad-ass outfits, are what make this stylish biker flick a cult classic.


As for the DVD, it has some pretty informative special features that are definitely worth checking out, including an introduction by Fangoria Editor Chris Alexander, interviews with the cast, and an interview with the writer of that cheesy, hippie ballad. The film's negatives were apparently lost, so it's been taken from the best 35mm stock available, and looks pretty good.


All in all, Psychomania is a fun, stylish film that will keep you grooving and hanging on from that foggy opening scene to the utterly surreal ending. You really can't miss out on seeing "the grooviest zombie biker movie of them all!"

Watch out for Joulupukki

We finally had the pleasure of watching Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale the other night and it was well worth the wait. Having heard about it a while ago, and having watched both of the shorts, I was anxiously awaiting it and had hoped to see it before Christmas. It wasn't however, until a few nights ago that we actually managed to procure a copy with decent sound and subtitles. What we saw was definitely one of the best movies to come out of 2010.

Jalmari Helander's Finnish film Rare Exports, based off two shorts that you must see here and here, is one of the best, most original stories I have seen in a film. It's a coming of age tale about a young, odd looking boy named Pietari, growing up in the Korvantunturi mountains of Lapland. It's a land of harsh winter and tough men, where the boys are expected to be men and where little Pietari struggles to connect with his gruff, reindeer slaughtering father.

24 days before Christmas, a group of American archaeological diggers uncover the frozen grave of the real Santa Claus, which is nothing close to what you've ever imagined him to be. They are given safety instructions which include "No drinking, smoking, cursing, loitering, cavorting or arguing. Any attempt to break these rules will result in death and/or the death of your co-workers." They of course, do not follow them. Pietari believes what he overhears at the dig site and does some investigating to find out more about Santa Claus. What he finds is disturbing; an evil, horned man that does terrible things to children, resembling the classic notion of Santa in no way. He now knows that Santa is dead and senses someone watching him every night. His suspicions grow greater when their annual reindeer ration is completely slaughtered before they can get to them and only he sees the ominous bare footprint of a man in the snow.

Jumping to Christmas day, Pietari and his father wake up to find something rather unexpected in their wolf trap; a very skinny, naked old man with a long white beard. The father, along with two other men, attempt to question the man, only to discover his rather violent side. Pietari tries to explain that he came to kidnap him and when they discover that the rest of the children in the town have gone missing, as well as all the radiators and potato sacks, they believe him and set out to find them. What they find is greater and more terrifying than they expected.


There is so much beauty in the way that this film was shot. It has such a whimsical, kids movie look to it, contrasted by all the creepy imagery. You get these stunning landscape shots that look far too beautiful to be real, with snow elegantly falling and a captivating score that makes the film feel all the more epic. I also appreciate the subtlety of the CGI used in the film. It's there only for the parts that truly need it and it ties in with the cinematography style quite nicely. The film also has a certain tensity about it because at a first watch, you really don't know if it's going to get violent or not. The creepiness of all those naked Santa helpers is actually quite intense and knowing what they're capable of, you never know when something terrible could happen. I particularly love the scene where they discover that their captive isn't Santa Claus, but just one of his helpers and then hundreds of them begin appearing out the dark, each more wild and grisly looking than the next, slowing creeping out at the them.


I also really appreciated the turn that Pietari's character took towards the end of the film. He starts out as this weird, kind of timid little kid that get's pushed around a lot by his older friend. When he realizes that he's the only one who knows what to do, he takes on this commanding role and is really quite sassy! It reminded us of how kids used to act in movies from the 80s, like The Monster Squad, where they were kind of tough, not afraid to swear and genuinely more accurate to how kids really are. He becomes this brave boy, calling out orders to his elders and willing to risk his life for everyone else, and to show his father that he's a man too.


It's a really beautiful story and there's just so much to it. It's a perfect mix of horror, comedy and childhood sentimentality and nostalgia. There's also a great quirkiness to it, especially in Pietari's case. Not only is he just an all around funny looking kid, but he walks around in the blistering cold in his little blue underpants and spends most of the movie wearing a helmet and shoulder pads over his snowsuit, carrying a shotgun. It's such a contrast to the monochromatic look of all the other characters, really setting him apart. I strongly believe that North American filmmakers need to take a good look at how movies are being made in Europe, especially around Scandinavia. We shouldn't be trying to recreate these beautiful films, we should be looking at what makes them so much more unique and generally just better. They have something figured out that we clearly haven't grasped, with a few exceptions. Jalmari Helander has created a fantastically creepy and enchanting new fairytale that I plan to add to my Christmas tradition.

One-Man Agony Opus Part 2

It seems fitting that I happened to watch this film the night after watching 127 Hours. Buried shows a very different approach at a movie about one guy, in once place for the whole movie. This movie is more literally just that. All that I saw of this film prior to watching it was a teaser that just showed Ryan Reynolds in a box, lit only by the light of lighter. It was only a few seconds long and didn't say anything except the movie's title. That intrigued me.

Rodrigo Cortes' high concept thriller starring Ryan Reynolds is all about playing with space and tension, very much in the style of Hitchcock. It's even being advertised using old Hitchcock movie poster art styles, like this one to the left. Very reminiscent of the posters for Vertigo and Frenzy.

Ryan Reynolds plays Paul Conroy, an American truck driver working in Iraq who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He wakes up in your worst nightmare: buried in a box, with no recollection of how he got there. All that he has with him is a lighter, a flask, some medication for his anxiety, a couple of glow sticks and a cell phone with dwindling battery life.

He gets a call from his captor, informing him that he has 90 minutes to secure a ransom to save his own life. After a lot of frantic screaming and freaking out, he starts dialing numbers. He tries everything from 411, to his company's personnel department, to his wife multiple times, and to a woman that he clearly has some animosity towards, struggling to get anyone to help him. His frustrating conversations with people that are asking too many stupid questions and are generally unable or willing to help him, add to the tensity of the film. That felt really realistic to me because how many times have you tried dealing with people on the phone and just ended up getting nowhere? That, paired with the terrifying realization that his oxygen is running out, sand leaking in through the cracks of the box, and the increasingly angry and demanding phone calls from his captor, make his situation all the more unbearable.


What was most effective about this film was the simplicity of the way it was shot. It's literally just Paul in the box, the only light coming from either his lighter, his cell phone, or one of the glow sticks that he found in there with him. There are no flahsbacks or shots of anyone outside of the box which really keeps you in there with him. That was what disappointed me about 127 Hours, and seeing how this film was done right afterwards proved how much more effective it can be. Sure, it's nice to show what beautiful shots you can do but if you really want to make your audience feel the tension and feel for what it's like to be trapped with your main character, this is the way to do it. I think it proves how effective a film can be by being small. With just a couple of boxes, with interchanging panels that can be taken out, depending on the camera angle, you get your whole set. Pair that with some colour filters and some plays on perspective and you have some really effective, and still beautiful shots. I remember reading somewhere that Ryan Reynolds had a day where he finally broke down after filming for so long in such enclosed spaces, and who could blame him. That must have really helped to get the role down for him though and his panic, frustrations and desperaty were convincing.

It's not an easy feat to make a 90 minute film like this that will keep your attention and though I may have gotten a little bit distracted in the beginning, there is a good amount of suspense and intensity more towards the end. I do think that the ending of this film was very fitting and really the only one that would make sense. It's a rare case to find a film with a good story and a good ending to match. Plus, it brought an even more physical horror to being buried alive. Oh yeah, and this film does have it's own moment of self-mutilation, though nowhere nearly as gruelling or horrible as cutting part of an arm off, it was still alright. Though I don't think it was a particularly outstanding performance in a particularly outstanding film, I think that it was good for what it was and quite effective. It offers a commentary on America's role in Iraq without jamming it down our throats which I appreciated. It's a very dirty, vulnerable and real feeling movie that anyone who enjoys a good suspense film should give a watch. Plus it was good to see Ryan Reynolds in such an up close and personal, serious role.