Looking Ahead

As we move into the second month of 2012, and the release schedule begins to gain momentum again, I thought I'd take a look at some of the flicks that are at the top of my "most anticipated" pile for the coming year. These are by no means the only films I'm looking forward to, but having given this some thought (and a fair bit of research), it's safe to say this represents the cream of the crop for me.

There's a few titles here that are listed on IMDb as being released in 2011, but I doubt they've been seen by many outside of festival screenings.

I'd like to acknowledge the tireless work of Garth Franklin at Dark Horizons whose "Notable Films of 2012" feature made my research for this a lot easier. He puts a huge amount of effort into compiling these exhaustive lists at the beginning of each year, and I'm glad he does because they're an invaluable resource.

So, in no particular order, here's 20 movies to get excited for over the coming months:




JOHN DIES AT THE END
Dir: Don Coscarelli

The return of Coscarelli! Based on a cult novel by David Wong, this promises to be a psychedelic, multidimensional mindfuck of a movie - druggy, tripped-out and featuring a slew of practical monster and gore FX. After the hugely enjoyable Bubba Ho-Tep, Coscarelli seems to be in his creative prime at the moment, and arguably far more relevant now than many of his contemporaries such as Carpenter and Romero. It's getting good reviews out of Sundance, and I can't wait to see this. So much so that I ordered the novel yesterday. And Paul Giamatti is in it!




COSMOPOLIS
Dir: David Cronenberg

Hey Cronenberg fans, are you feeling spoilt? You should be, because we're getting not one, but two movies from the master this year (I finally saw A Dangerous Method earlier tonight!). This is another book adaptation (this time from a novel by Don Delillo), starring Robert "sparkly" Pattinson, and I'm actually intrigued to see what sort of performance Cronenberg pulls out of him. Cosmopolis' simple synopsis of "a multimillionaire on a 24-hour odyssey across Manhattan", coupled with reports that much of the action takes place within a single car, makes it sound like a very minimal affair. However, with an estimated budget of 20 million, who knows? I could be completely wrong here, but I'm wondering if this is going to be in a similar vein to Martin Scorsese's wonderful After Hours. More Giamatti here too!




THE CABIN IN THE WOODS
Dir: Drew Goddard

I've never really been into Joss Whedon, but he is an undeniably talented genre writer, and this long-shelved horror (SF?) movie has got me psyched. I know very little about this, and will keep steering clear of all reviews and trailers to stay as ignorant as possible. I'm hoping for something different and surprising here.




PROMETHEUS
Dir: Ridley Scott

What can I say about this? I'm one of those people who believe without reservation that Scott is responsible for the two greatest SF movies ever made, so his return to the genre is very welcome indeed (he also recently secured the rights to my most beloved SF novel, Joe Haldeman's The Forever War). Any doubts I had about this were immediately dispelled by the incredible first trailer, which teases an epic, beautiful, hard SF film. The cast is fantastic, the design & FX look spectacular, and I for one am glad that we probably won't be seeing the now quite redundant xenomorph. This looks like science fiction on a truly grand scale, the likes of which we don't often see anymore in this age of green screen sound stages*, overused CGI and recycled ideas. It could also be a huge disaster of self indulgent wankery. Either way, this is my most anticipated film of the year.

*Much of the film was shot on location in Iceland, the Scottish Highlands, the Jordanian desert and on enormous sets constructed at Pinewood Studios in England.




THE GREY
Dir: Joe Carnahan

Carnahan is a director that I haven't taken much notice of until now (Narc was watchable, but The A-Team can just go fuck themselves), however The Grey looks to be the kind of grim, realistic, man-against-nature survival thriller that really gets my blood pumping. See also Frozen and The Reef. I also really dig Liam Neeson. And wolves. This opens here in a couple of weeks, and I plan on being there opening day.




JUAN OF THE DEAD (Juan de los Muertos)
Dir: Alejandro Brugués

Cuba's first zombie flick is the sophomore effort for director Alejandro Brugués, and if the word coming out of various festivals is to be trusted, it may just be the best zombie film we've seen in a while. As with most great living dead films, the zombies here apparently take a back seat to an endearing and interesting cast of living characters. I've heard that it features some pretty tasty gore too. Brugués has stated that Juan was not intended as a satire of life in Havana under Castro... and I'll reserve judgement on that until I see it.




DJANGO UNCHAINED
Dir: Quentin Tarantino

Really interested to see how Quentin follows up his masterpiece (and career highpoint) Inglourious Basterds. I personally think the man was born to make westerns, so my expectations are set very high for this. As usual he's hand picked an amazing cast, and I'm looking forward to seeing DiCaprio's Calvin Candie, but the big reason to get excited about Django is the casting of KURT MOTHERFUCKING RUSSELL.




THE RAID (Serbuan Maut)
Dir: Gareth Evans

Is The Raid the Assault On Precinct 13 of martial arts movies? This Indonesian/American co-production promises to be a wall-to-wall barrage of mayhem, ultra violence and hyper cool... all smashing into your cerebral cortex via the Indonesian martial art of silat. Apparently the hand-to-hand combat and firefights in The Raid are some of the wildest and most impressively choreographed in the history of the genre. Everything about this movie just screams badass. Really looking forward to this one.




GRAVITY
Dir: Alfonso Cuarón

With Children Of Men, Cuarón gave us a modern science fiction masterpiece. A film as remarkable for its astounding technical and artistic achievements, as for its seemingly prescient vision of the most terrifying future dystopia since Blade Runner. As with Ridley Scott, Cuarón is a perfectionist, obsessed with detail, and therefore perfectly suited to creating supremely convincing SF worlds. I'm very excited to see what these talents and sensibilities bring to the space genre. So much so that I'll tolerate an entire movie of nothing but Sandra Bullock.




THE ABCS OF DEATH
Dir: Everyone

The horror anthology is back in vogue in a big way, but I doubt we've ever seen anything like this. Angela Bettis, Bruno Forzani, Hélène Cattet, Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, Jason Eisener, Adrián García Bogliano, Xavier Gens, Noboru Iguchi, Jorge Michel Grau, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Simon Rumley, Marcel Sarmiento, Srdjan Spasojevic, Timo Tjahjanto, Andrew Traucki, Nacho Vigalondo, Jake West, Ti West, Ben Wheatley, Adam Wingard... and that's just the directors that I like! There's six more - 26 horror auteurs in all. This will be insane.




ONLY GOD FORGIVES
Dir: Nicolas Winding Refn

I love Refn. I can barely fault him for a single frame of his work, but his arthouse crime films - Pusher I-III, Bronson, Drive - are cinematic perfection and pure celluloid dynamite. Only God Forgives sees Refn reuniting with Ryan Gosling, but this time the beauty and carnage (and beautiful carnage) will explode not in the city of angels, but on the sweaty streets of the Bangkok underworld. Bring it on.




[REC]³ Génesis
Dir: Paco Plaza

Director Paco Plaza returns for the third entry in this unstoppable Spanish zombie series. Having been thoroughly creeped out by the first two movies, I'm definitely up for another serving. Believe me, I'm suffering from zombie-fatigue as much as you are, I'm fucking sick of the genre right now, but these films have cleverly skewed the old tropes in surprising and demonic directions. This time around we're getting a prequel, and I think I read somewhere that they've dropped the found footage gimmick in favour of traditional cinematography. The thing that will make or break this movie: they need to keep playing it dead straight. No winking at the camera, no satire. Just pure horror.




THE SQUAD (El Páramo)
Dir: Jaime Osorio Marquez

I don't know much about this Colombian horror film from first time director Jaime Osorio Marquez, but I'm champing at the bit to check it out. I don't think I've ever seen a horror film from Colombia (unless you count Cannibal Holocaust which was shot in the Colombian Amazon), and I wonder if this is maybe the country's first? The Squad is a military horror flick, an odd little sub-genre that I've always felt is ripe with possibility, yet rarely yields good results. According to reviews the film features loads of beautiful, misty, jungle atmosphere, also utilising a slowly mounting sense of dread and paranoia to good effect (think The Thing). I love atmospheric horror with an emphasis on chills over action, so I'm already there.




MORITURIS
Dir: Raffaele Picchio

Who said Italian horror is dead? A couple of years ago I really enjoyed Federico Zampaglione's Shadow, and now I'm dying to be assaulted and traumatised by Raffaele Picchio's debut feature - Morituris. The plot of this little shocker seems to involve Roman gladiators coming back from the dead to rape, torture, mutilate and murder a group of unfortunate amateur actors. I truly hope that's all it is, because it sounds perfect. Morituris piqued my interest last year when I read that it pissed off some horror fans at a festival screening, because it took the whole rape/torture thing too far. Bloody Disgusting gave this movie "negative 100 million out of 5 Skulls". All milquetoasts apparently. Grue courtesy of Sergio Stivaletti.




IRON SKY
Dir: Timo Vuorensola

It would seem that the world got really tired of waiting for Richard Raaphorst to get his shit together and make Worst Case Scenario and Army Of Frankenstein, so now we have this movie from Finland instead. I'm a real sucker for this kind of gonzo Nazi weirdness, and I really want this to be good, but... let's just say this could go either way. An over abundance of CG in the trailers is a bit of a worry. But regardless of the quality of the FX, this movie will sink or float on the standard of the writing and comedy. I think the choice of Laibach to score the film was a good one, I'd never heard them before, but the music works perfectly over the trailer. Sort of Wagnerian symphonic industrial or something. According to IMDb, Timo, Iron Sky's director, is in a Finnish black metal industrial noise band called Älymystö. Anyway, Udo Kier is in this, so even if it's terrible I'll probably still watch it.




BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW
Dir: Panos Cosmatos

This Canadian SF film (another directorial debut) is actually two years old, and is finally getting a DVD release from Magnet this year. Comparisons to Tarkovsky and Kubrick have me excited, as do reports that the film is visually stunning - described as a psychedelic experience - with a powerful, immersive sound design. The plot revolves around a captive girl being used as a test subject for a series of nightmarish drug experiments in a secret research facility. Beyond that the story and characters are supposed to be quite ambiguous, with a minimum of explanation for why this is all happening. I love genre movies that are almost more of a sensory experience than a narrative, and I'm anticipating that this will be along those lines. Beyond The Black Rainbow has cult science fiction movie written all over it.




KOTOKO
Dir: Shinya Tsukamoto

After the disappointment of Tetsuo III, I'm looking forward to a return to form for Tsukamoto. The word is that this is a hallucinatory psychological horror film dealing with post-partum depression, and featuring an impressive performance from Japanese singer Cocco. I'm thinking that this film will deliver jarring contrasts of beauty and brutality.




YOU'RE NEXT
Dir: Adam Wingard

This film has been getting raves out of festivals for months now, and it looks like Adam Wingard is on the rise as horror's next big thing. You're Next is reportedly a home invasion thriller that twists genre conventions in unexpected ways, serving it up with a healthy dose of very black humour. This is another movie that I've avoided trailers for, because I want to be surprised. And hey, Barbara Crampton is in this!

WRONG
Dir: Quentin Dupieux

The followup to the dadaist horror insanity of Rubber! I'm really fascinated to see where Dupieux goes after that trip. Rubber was a love it or loath it affair, and I definitely fall into the former camp, so I'm salivating for this. This tale of a man searching for his lost dog looks to be another surrealist film that will continue to subvert the cinematic rulebook in weird and wonderful ways. Even the poster reminds me of a Magritte painting.




V/H/S
Dir: David Bruckner, Glenn McQuaid, Radio Silence, Joe Swanberg, Ti West, Adam Wingard

Another horror anthology, this time breathing new life into the tired found footage genre, and it's getting killer reviews out of Sundance right now. Some really interesting directors here. David Bruckner was one of the fellows behind the underrated The Signal, Glenn McQuaid directed the enjoyable Burke & Hare comedy I Sell The Dead, and Ti West and Adam Wingard should require no further introduction. I've read that this actually has some genuinely frightening moments. We'll see about that!

What movies are you guys looking forward to this year?

Tutti il Colori del Buio

This here is some vile, horror-infused crust, served up with a tasty garnish of neanderthal death and doom metal, likely to please fans of Entombed, Asphyx, Bolt Thrower etc.

Washington D.C.'s Ilsa are a relatively new band (formed in '07 I think) who are a good fit for the EYE, not just for their punishing punk & metal assault, but also due to their obsession with quality cinema. Having taken their latest album title from Sergio Martino's stylish psychedelic nightmare Tutti i Colori del Buio (although they misspelt it, bless 'em), and with song titles like "120 Days", I'd say it's fair to assume that their favourite section of the video store isn't Disney classics. Not to mention that their name is borrowed from everyone's favourite sadistic S.S. bitch - yes, right down to the font.

To be honest their slower stuff leaves me a bit cold, but when they speed things up on tracks like "120 Days", "Butcher's Castle" and "Frostthrower", they unleash a vicious ferocity that puts a big shit-eating grin on my face. Drummer Josh is a particular stand-out for me, pounding out some relentless and infectious D-beat rhythms that have kept me wanting more. I believe he's also responsible for all their artwork which is none too shabby either.

They also have a split out with another degenerate band that's sullied the pages of this blog before, Finland's Hooded Menace.

Buy or listen to Tutti il Colori del Buio HERE...

A Dangerous Method

Here's one for the locals. Popcorn Taxi is starting off the year in style with a screening of David Cronenberg's latest, his take on psychoanalysis and sex in pre-World War I Vienna - A Dangerous Method. The film marks his third consecutive collaboration with Viggo Mortensen, his second with Vincent Cassel and his first with Michael Fassbender (so incredibly good in Steve McQueen's Hunger).

As with all of Cronenberg's recent films, it may seem like a radical departure from his early body of work, but a closer examination reveals that it's very much in line with his ongoing thematic concerns.

The screening features a Q&A with producer Jeremy Thomas, who previously worked with Cronenberg on Naked Lunch and Crash, as well as producing a number of other films that I'm very fond of, among them Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky & The Dreamers as well as Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins.

The screening is on January 30 at the usual Bondi Junction venue. Tickets and further info HERE.

KILL LIST

When I saw Ben Wheatley's Kill List at last year's Sydney Film Fest, I thought that it made the other horror films I'd seen there (Stake Land and Hobo With A Shotgun) look pedestrian by comparison. It seemed to me as I watched Kill List, with the memories of those other two films fresh in mind, that where they were treading some very familiar ground, this little English flick playing out in front of me was something original and exciting.

It was one of those rare times watching a movie when that little alarm goes off in your head... your eyes widen, and pulse quickening you sit up a bit straighter in your seat and think "wait a minute, I've never seen anything quite like this before". By the end of the fest it was not only my favourite horror entry, but favourite regardless of genre, beating out some other exceptionally good films such as Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins, Terrence Malick's Tree Of Life and José Padilha's Elite Squad: The Enemy Within.

That was back in June, and I wondered then if maybe I'd already watched the best movie I'd see that year. Six months later and Kill List has in fact turned out to be my favourite of 2011, and having seen it again recently I found it to be no less transfixing and haunting.


They say there's nothing really new under the sun, even in the realm of pure fantasy, where the sky's the limit and ideas should only be constrained by the extent of one's imagination (and in the case of cinema, the fatness of one's wallet). Where movies are concerned I think it's true to a certain extent, and there seems to be plenty of evidence around these days to support that claim, in the form of all the remakes, adaptations and sequels that are being foisted on us. In recent years, one method (or gimmick?) employed by a number of filmmakers seeking to inject some freshness into an original, but familiar story is the genre mashup, blend, crossover or whatever you want to call it. Sometimes it works, but often it feels too ham-fisted and ill-conceived to be really effective. Just because you clumsily shoehorn zombies and kung fu into your western doesn't mean it's going to be more exciting. To me the result is often that the whole is reduced to less than the sum of it's parts. Sometimes I'd rather just watch a good western... without the zombies. Or the kung fu.

And that's part of what makes Kill List so successful for me. I can't remember when I've seen a film combine disparate genres so seamlessly and with such a feeling of effortless fluidity. Especially given the nature of the film's structure - the different genres don't run parallel to each other so much as they are episodic, one following the other, almost neatly compartmentalised within each act of the film.

The first act is a classic example of British social realism, reminiscent of the "kitchen sink realism" of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. I quickly found myself so engaged by the seemingly mundane trials and tribulations of the main characters, that I honestly would have been more than happy for the film to continue in this direction, without veering into more fantastic territory:

Suburban couple Jay and Shel love each other, but in spite of that their marriage is rapidly falling apart. Shel is accustomed to a standard of living that they can no longer afford, because Jay hasn't been working. There's a sense that Jay is lost at sea and frustrated, despite the outward appearance of a stable, middle class home and family life. When the strain becomes too much, and comes to a very ugly head at a dinner party with Jay's old friend Gal and his new girlfriend Fiona, Jay is forced to reconsider his situation and take on a job that Gal is offering him.

This set up, which sounds mundane, is anything but. You see Jay and Gal aren't just old mates, they're professional hitmen, with a shady past that may include some very morally dubious mercenary work in other parts of the world. The two men prepare for their new assignment... but are unaware that Fiona may not be as naive and innocent as she appears.


From here the film shifts gears, turning into a gritty, deliberately paced hitman thriller, but the change isn't jarring at all, and in fact feels perfectly natural. It continues to feel fluid and natural even as events get more and more weird - eventually steering the film into it's third genre - outright horror. I'll give nothing else away, as I think it best to go into Kill List knowing as little as possible about the second and third acts.

I can find very little to complain about in Wheatley's second feature (I need to track down his first, Down Terrace). The performances are all virtually flawless, the whole cast of talented actors are obviously having fun, and really immersing themselves in their roles. Unsurprising, because as written by Wheatley and Amy Jump, the main characters are multi-layered, complex and endearing. The cinematography is right up my alley - carefully composed and framed shots imbued with plenty of stillness, giving the film room to breath and allowing each shot to sink in deeply.

Kill List isn't exactly bursting at the seams with action (again, think of my comparison to social realist cinema), but when the violence comes, you probably won't be ready for it, and it's likely to shock you. It's sudden, realistic and very, very nasty. It got under my skin and made me feel bad. Just the way it should.

If there's one complaint that I can level at this movie it's that I slightly preferred the tone of the first two acts to the overtly horrific climax, which is surprising considering my predilection towards horror. That said I still found the conclusion to be solid and memorable, so it's a minor quibble really, and didn't effect my overall enjoyment of the film.

With Kill List, Ben Wheatley has delivered a new and exciting cult classic. If you think so too, and if you ever meet Ben, maybe you'd like to say to him:

"THANK YOU"





Some of the runners up for my top film of 2011 include Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, Miguel Ángel Vivas' Kidnapped, Jee-woon Kim's I Saw The Devil, Lucky McKee's The Woman, Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins and Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene.

Monsters For Perverts

My love for Vincenzo Natali and his wonderful Splice is already well documented on this blog. As such I was delighted to see today that Sideshow Collectibles is planning to release a 1:1 scale replica of the nascent Dren creature. That's a pic of their sculpt at right, though at this stage it appears to be just an unpainted maquette. The detail looks good and Natali himself had this to say about it in the press release:

"Sideshow has sculpted Baby Dren with all the love and passion that a proud parent could ever bestow on a child. Every muscle, bone and tendon is perfectly recreated. No geneticist no matter how brilliant could hope to compete with this exquisite work."

Perhaps, if little Dren sells, we'll see a maquette of the fantastic mature creature at some point:

Also coming from Sideshow this year is what may well prove to be the ultimate scaled replica of Giger's 1979 creature from Alien (right). In the last decade there's been a glut of Alien toys, statues and busts, many of them beautifully designed and lovingly produced, but I doubt any of them will hold a candle to this 28" tall (star)beast. At $799 it ain't cheap, but I suppose it's all relative because I once paid about a hundred more than that for a 1979 18" Kenner mint-in-box. The Kenner will always be the holy grail for collectors, and rightly so because it's a primo piece of genuine historical ephemera, but truth-be-told if you've ever seen one the sculpt is very rudimentary (it was just a child's toy after all). So from that perspective I guess the realism and quality of this new Sideshow piece makes it a bargain? Or maybe not. Regardless, get all the details on it at Twitch here.

For the record, I actually quit collecting toys about eight years ago when I ebayed a pretty extensive collection of horror toys, models and other ephemera (mostly Alien, Dawn Of The Dead, 70's & 80's horror and Universal Monsters) to score some quick cash. Occasionally when I see some tasty items like these I consider jumping off the wagon, but honestly I'm glad I quit because I just don't have the money to blow on this stuff anymore. Toy collecting is an expensive and very addictive habit. Not to mention what a pain in the ass it was to keep it all dusted!

Of course the big joke here is that we're talking about "toys" based on two of the most overtly sexualised creatures in the history of monster movies. As Devin at Badass Digest already pointed out today, baby Dren's head is essentially the head of a cock, complete with a slit-like urethral opening for a mouth. And of course Giger's stalking nightmare is everyone's favourite hybrid of big, scary phallus and vagina dentata, dripping with K-Y® Jelly (they actually used K-Y in the movie).

To illustrate that point further, I used to have a 1:1 scale chestburster and facehugger, both made by a Japanese company called Tsukuda Hobby (at the time Japan dominated the Alien toy market, with virtually nothing being produced in the US). They were flesh coloured, and made of this soft vinyl that was disturbingly reminiscent of the weird plastics they use to make sex toys. Couple those attributes with the fact that there was a life sized pussy on the belly of the facehugger and the chestburster looked like a rearing schlong with teeth, and it's hardly surprising that every single one of my friends who picked them up commented on how blatantly erotic they were.

Seeing all these creatures on screen, in the context of the films is one thing, but holding them in your hands really drives home the extent of their sexual nature.

I'd like to point out that unlike some people I don't subscribe to the view that Alien is just one big Freudian metaphor for anal rape. For me the sexuality more or less begins and ends with the creature designs and the architecture of the derelict spacecraft.