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Criterion Review: I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE & THE SEVENTH VICTIM 4K/Blu
This week The Criterion Collection offers an atmospheric double feature of two 1943 films produced by Val Lewton for R.K.O., I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim. Lewton made an immediate impact on the cinema scene a year prior with his atmospheric sensation Cat People, directed by Jacques Tourneur. Cat People (which has also previously been released by Criterion) established what became synonymous with Lewton’s style (though the contributions of Tourneur and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca should not be overlooked), combining psychological horror with elements of film noir. Viewers hadn’t seen anything quite like it before: dreamlike visuals, deep shadows, mature themes, and unseen dangers. More deliberate and artful than the other monster films of the era, but no less engaging.
I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim follow in a similar vein, and I can see why Criterion chose to pair them together. Besides carrying forward the “Lewton style” and bleak endings established with Cat People, these films also share a particular triumvirate of main characters: a female protagonist, a married man who serves as a romantic interest, and that man’s wife who is imperiled or victimized, and emotionally or physically unavailable as a result.
I Walked with a Zombie (1943) – directed by Jacques Tourneur
Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur immediately followed up Cat People with another collaboration, this time transporting viewers to a small island in the Caribbean.
Like White Zombie and other (pre-Romero) zombie films of the era, I Walked with a Zombie is about the classic Haitian-style or voodoo-based zombies, quite different from the modern conception of reanimated corpses hungry for flesh and brains.
Nurse Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) arrives on San Sebastian Island, newly employed by plantation owner Paul Holland (Tom Conway) to care for his wife Jessica (Christine Gordon), who has catatonic symptoms. Although mobile, she is generally nonresponsive and completely nonverbal, her unblinking eyes vacant and disengaged.
As Betsy becomes more familiar with the island and its denizens, she takes greater interest in the local religious practices and consider whether her patient’s state is tied to – or could be cured by – the mysterious and foreign power of voodoo.
Despite its sensational title and voodoo themes, it’s a pretty grounded and character-driven little film that is steeped in atmosphere and mystery, often deepened by the haunting sound of distant drums that fill the night air. The film even treats the subject of voodoo with some level of realism. This was an era in which films would easily devolve into offensive and racist theatrics, but the depictions of voodoo were based on research and not just the filmmakers’ imaginings. The film does zero in on the fear of “otherness” and in particular the frightening depiction of a tall, black zombie with ghoulish features – but not, my opinion, offensively so.
The Seventh Victim – directed by Mark Robson
Upon learning of the disappearance of her older sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks), Mary (Kim Hunter) returns home from boarding school and sets out to find her lost sibling.
The film follows Mary’s investigation as she learns that her sister’s disappearance is no simple matter, and she gets pulled into a swirl of baffling clues, dangerous villains, and helpful allies. It’s quickly apparent that Jacqueline got herself in some sort of trouble, and the closer that Mary gets to finding her, she may be putting herself in harm’s way as well.
Without imparting too much detail, there’s a conspiracy afoot, and of a surprising nature.
The film’s twisty last act shifts perspective to focus on Jacqueline, as the rest of the story plays out from her perspective, leading to a shocking ending.
Melancholic, suspenseful, and beautifully shot, the film reminds me of some other noir films of the era, the swirling mystery of Phantom Lady, and the woman in unusual peril in My Name is Julia Ross. This is a story that pulls you in, and benefits from being populated with enjoyably watchable characters against an oppressive sensation of unknown peril.
The Package
Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim share a Criterion edition as a double feature, spine number 1236. The booklet is a 2-sided “flipper” with I Walked with a Zombie on one side and The Seventh Victim on the other, containing essays “Better Doctors” by Chris Fujiwara and “The Inner Darkness” by Lucy Sante, respectively.
I’m reviewing the 2-disc 4K edition which includes both a 4K disc of the films as well as the Blu-ray disc containing both films and the extras. (Note all screenshots in this article are captured from the Blu-ray disc).
These are gorgeous films, notable for Lewton’s noirish style full of dreamlike imagery and incredible lighting and shadows. The restorations are wonderfully done, showcasing this style handsomely.
Both films feature new 4K restorations from nitrate original camera negatives, information about which is detailed in the booklet.
Special Features & Extras (Blu-ray Disc)
- Feature Audio Commentaries:
- Kim Newman and Stephen Jones on I Walked with a Zombie
- Steve Haberman on The Secenth Victim
- Deliver Us from Evil: Imogen Sara Smith on I Walked with a Zombie/The Seventh Victim (47:00)
Film historian discusses parallels in the two films as well as both films individually, with great depth and insight: topics include their style and place in film history, use of female characters, and the filmmakers’ careers. Some of her most interesting observations concern the depictions of race and voodoo in I Walked with a Zombie.
- Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy (53:24)
This 2005 documentary features many familiar filmmakers and historians, as well as Lewton’s son. They discuss Lewton’s legacy and impact, covering a lot of ground including his career in prior to filmmaking, characteristic style, collaborations and friendship with Boris Karloff.
- “The Origins of the Zombie from Haiti to the US” (12:42)
Excerpted from an episode of the PBS documentary series Monstrum, covering zombiism and voodoo
- Audio essays from The Secret History of Hollywood podcast
- Jean Brooks (53:14)
- Tom Conway (1:09:53)
- Trailers
- I Walked with a Zombie (1:04)
- The Seventh Victim (1:14)
A/V Out
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I Walked with a Zombie / The Seventh Victim – 4K UHD Blu-ray | Blu-ray
Except where noted, all 16:9 screen images in this review are direct captures from the Blu-ray (not 4K) disc with no editing applied, but may have compression or resizing inherent to web formatting.
- Feature Audio Commentaries:
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Two Cents Dives into Found Footage Horror Month with LAKE MUNGO
Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contribute their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to [email protected].
Julian here! My Cinapse journey began in 2014 with a piece about how an underground Japanese fake documentary was the best horror film you likely hadn’t seen yet. That film, Koji Shiraishi’s Noroi: the Curse, skillfully blended frights both real and fictional in ways that set a new bar for my expectations of the genre. A decade later, things have come full circle–as my debut audio commentary is included on Noroi’s first Western release as part of the J-Horror Rising box set from Arrow Films. To celebrate, Ed invited me to curate this month’s Two Cents, focusing on personal recommendations for found footage horror.
I hope this month’s selection of innovative found footage features reflects Noroi‘s trailblazing spirit, especially as the genre remains split between equally vocal champions and detractors in a world where our relationship with horror, technology, and media seems to evolve daily.
The Pick: Lake Mungo (2008)
To start, there’s no better film than Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo. Like Noroi, Lake Mungo transcends the traditional limitations of found footage by presenting itself as a fully completed documentary. Anderson foregoes expected shaky-cam scares shot by ill-fated characters in favor of a sleek, polished documentary of unexpected technical and emotional scope–one whose participants make it out alive, yet not unscathed from the horror they’ve witnessed. In assembling various footage sources, Anderson draws viewers into a haunting exploration of grief–blending love and loss, public and private lives, life and death, past and future in a deeply unsettling yet beautiful fashion.
It’s also a film whose journey into the public eye slightly mirrors Noroi’s own–years after its high-profile yet all-too-brief run as part of Lionsgate’s annual Eight Films to Die For series, Lake Mungo has gradually gathered a reputation as one of the most chilling faux-documentary horror films out there. It received a stellar (and region-free!) special edition from Second Sight in the UK, and horror auteur Mike Flanagan recently introduced a new 4K restoration at this year’s Beyond Fest.
I’m excited to gather everyone’s thoughts on Joel Anderson’s staggering, singular directorial effort as we kick off a month of boundary-pushing, reality-upending found footage films!
Featured Guests
Madeleine
The moment that haunts me from Lake Mungo is not the moment that frightens me the most. It is an ultra wide shot of the Australian landscape in twilight, a single road bisecting the frame, and a single car rolling backwards through frame. When I first watched Lake Mungo, projected in a large, mostly empty movie theater, it was the most striking image of grief I had ever seen. A mother and father leaving the morgue after identifying the body of their daughter, their car breaking down and only being able to drive in reverse. Even if it feels like the world is ending, we must keep going. Our lives must continue. We need to go home.
My mother was diagnosed with a very aggressive stage 4 lung cancer last month. Most nights I am driving home from the hospital in darkness, feeling a crushing sensation in my chest, my breathing shallow and my heart heavy. I need to get home, but I am being pulled back. I am driving in reverse.
While Lake Mungo is unquestionably a horror movie, it’s also one of the most powerful films about grief I’ve ever seen. I think a lot of this is due to the faux documentary format, which is utilized for a severe realism, as well as a means to relay information outside of a traditional narrative for maximum impact. Watching a fictional family lose a loved one is one thing, but seeing it recreated with old, analog footage, interviews tinged with trauma, and being told “this is real” just hits different. It feels real.
The moments that frighten me at a surface level the most in Lake Mungo is the obvious, Alice’s premonition. A jump scare so loud and so ostentatious compared to everything else the film presents. But what gets under my skin is the extensive use of the space in a frame throughout. Things hidden in corners, like a magic trick relying on sleight of hand. It becomes clear this is the space where Alice’s story will be told — even if her ghost does not appear, her brother Mathew expresses a compulsion to insert her into photos and videos. Maybe this is what a real haunting would look like… Not a garish apparition, but a compulsion to hang on.
Towards the end of the film, it is discovered that Alice did a session with the same spiritual medium that her mother worked with months later, both recorded and given to the documentary production for analysis, and played for the audience. As Alice’s guided vision syncs with her mother’s, no commentary is provided. Simply two intercut narrations as the camera moves through their empty house. Both spirits, one still living and breathing but bound to the afterlife by her grief, one a memory clinging to their hearts, passing by each other in the place that was most intimate to them — their home.
Where do we hold our loved ones while they persist in their half-lives? We live with the spirits of our loved ones, alive or dead like Alice, and we choose where we leave them, and how we see them. Choose to insert them into memories, into photos. Choose to lock them in a house and move away. As the family vacates the house where they have lived through so much grief, we think we may see Alice still there, still clinging to her home. It is inconclusive if Alice’s story is finished, or ever will be finished. But at least we know, she made it home.
“I guess I just really wanted to be inside someone else’s life for a while.”
Found footage only feels vital when it evokes or functions as a cursed object. Without convincingly presenting this inherently artificial thing as the genuine article, or getting the audience to play along, it feels like a gimmick.
Lake Mungo possesses a unity of form, wherein the quality of the “archival footage” directly relates to the quality of the “documentary” footage. Neither depiction exceeds the veracity of their purported source, like news reports, talking head interviews, and the home movie footage at the center of the “investigation,” forming the engine of the film. No elements of the movie betray this concept, or the filmmakers’ adherence to it. No one feels silly, there is no gotcha, and no one is the butt of the joke. There is no joke. This is someone’s life we’re talking about.
The care taken in attention to detail to mimic a documentary, not a horror film, makes all the difference in verisimilitude. We follow the victim’s family’s coworkers; we’re presented with tableaux of funeral parlor workers, grief counseling sessions, and garage band practice; and we see candid photographs of the past alongside pastoral footage of the present.
Even the title, a la The Blair Witch Project, is a clever use of restraint, insisting on telling this story with utmost sincerity. With Lake Mungo, the commitment to this particular bit is even more unflinching, daring not to use any words that may evoke any horror elements whatsoever in its title–instead allowing its straight-faced delivery to terrify you with its hypnotic, gestalt presentation. Pieced together, Lake Mungo becomes something–somehow–so much more horrific than you could have imagined when it began, and you knew it was fake.
Convincing, unknown performers–standouts being David Pledger and Rosie Traynor as the parents–populate every role. This briskly establishes a stakes and tone that’s constantly, subtly reinforced throughout this story. It automatically engages you in a way that makes the movie’s payoffs extremely scary and satisfying, with a compounding effect unmatched by other films in this subgenre (barring Blair Witch and Noroi: the Curse).
The fact that the film’s central photographs and home movie footage used to seamlessly construct and stitch together Lake Mungo’s false reality also become the vessels for the film’s narrative and experiential payoffs is an impressive sticking of the landing.
Director Joel Anderson deserves immense credit and admiration for his achievement here. Lake Mungo sadly remains his sole directorial credit, and I hope that his lack of follow-up films isn’t due to any lack of faith in him as a filmmaker. Rather, that his singular work is instead yet another example of his restraint as an auteur, unwilling to do anything that would diminish or dilute the spell that Lake Mungo casts on those convinced (or willing to) believe. His Executive Producer credits in recent years make me hope the above even more so.
It just feels real–like someone just found this footage and released it as a complete, polished documentary. I mean, come on–didn’t you see what I just saw? That poor girl, and her poor family…
And don’t even get me started on its bizarre, seemingly superfluous connections to Twin Peaks. The Palmer family, and an entire community by extension, grieves and is traumatized by the death of the young Palmer girl, a death prophesied in a supernatural, self-fulfilling manner, with her corpse being found by a body of water, not to mention doppelgangers, secret journals, burying things in the woods, and secret tapes of scandalous sexual exploitation becoming major elements later on. Weird!
While my week didn’t allow the time to do a deep dive into my thoughts on this great film, I wanted to note that Lake Mungo was the most influential mockumentary on my own work when setting out to tackle my found footage film Tahoe Joe because it’s so realistic and it truly takes itself seriously as a “based on real events” piece. I actually thought it was a real documentary for about the first half hour because it was so convincing. And, for a film that really only has one shock moment – and we all know that moment – it still finds a way to build a creeping dread leading up to it. I’ll never forget that reveal, though; you can tell something is off even with the poor quality from the cell footage, and as it gets closer and closer and they start to show you frame by frame of what she’s walking by… still gives me goosebumps and this very real sense of seeing something I wasn’t supposed to see. It’s just haunting stuff.
The Team
I don’t believe in ghosts. I just don’t. But nothing in the world scares me like ghost movies scare me. And holy shit, Lake Mungo had me quaking in my boots. What a remarkable accomplishment this little Australian mockumentary pulls off with its deceptively twisting narrative and classical, almost banal visuals that yield ever more disturbing images the deeper you look. This is a haunted-ass movie.
Writer/Director Joel Anderson really crafted a script that worked in a massively satisfying way and almost held me in the palm of its hand for the entire runtime. I had this very personal experience watching the film where each time I thought I was starting to get ahead of the script or asking a question about the central mystery of “what happened to Alice Palmer?”, it either answered the question and raised a new, more intriguing one, or zigged where I thought it would zag. The twists and turns here are remarkable, and yet never particularly strain credulity. The grieving Palmer family looking for answers in light of their teenage daughter’s tragic death kind of flail about but always feel like real human beings wrestling with tragedy in a hyper-modern fashion: with a documentary crew shoved into their faces. Anderson was always a step or two ahead of me in a way that is uniquely satisfying, almost like he was in my head and answering each concern or question I had in real time.
Lake Mungo was simultaneously not as unrelentingly harsh and soul crushing as its reputation (it’s got a real heart and a genuine streak of empathy running through it as the audience feels for the surviving Palmers), and even more frightening than expected as it creeps ever so slowly under your skin until the last of the credits roll, revealing that Anderson has indeed been ahead of you, guiding you towards the inexorable end.
This is a remarkable piece of faux documentary horror that I won’t soon forget, much to my non-believing-but-what-was-that-sound dismay.
Lake Mungo is one of those movies that serves as a dividing line in my life, a sense of two eras forming in my brain, one for before I saw this haunting film, and one for after. It changed my DNA, shifted the way I thought about horror, found footage, and the nature of ghost stories.
In the years since that marvelous change, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this movie, trying to drill down into what specifically hit me in such a powerful, indelible way, and the film’s own aura of mystery has always flummoxed me a bit. I don’t know that I’ll ever find a concise way to explain the spell Lake Mungo casts, which is perhaps paradoxically part of the appeal. After all, can we ever really explain the ghosts in our lives, even if we can recount in exact detail how they manifested for us?
If I had to take a stab at it, though, I think it would come down to the way the film handles a certain sense of inevitability, a foreboding cloud of fate that hovers over the Palmer family as they try to reckon with the loss of Alice. Lake Mungo is a film filled with twists, from the reveal of Alice’s very personal secrets to the reveal of Mathew Palmer’s various deceptions to, of course, the discovery of that horrifying footage on Alice’s recovered cell phone. These swerves all work remarkably well, especially in the docudrama context in which they’re presented, so you might come away thinking that this is a film about how you never really know someone, even after they’re gone and you’ve combed through their life.
That’s certainly part of it, but what endures about Lake Mungo for me is the feeling that this was all always going to happen. All it needed was a camera to turn on it, the right amount of attention to fuel its cold fire. Does Alice ever disappear if she doesn’t capture that footage on her phone? Does the family ever learn about her secret life if Mathew doesn’t set up those cameras? And perhaps most importantly, do we learn what’s really lurking in Mathew’s images even if we don’t keep looking?
Maybe not, but Lake Mungo‘s overall tone is one in which all of these surprises are somehow inevitable, like Alice’s own revelation that she was always fated to die. In the world of this film, we are all haunted, even if we don’t realize it, and the real journey isn’t about learning that, but about what we risk when we dare to look closer.
Opening with black-and-white Victorian images of spiritualist photographs, writer-director Joel Anderson hammers home the central theme of Lake Mungo: that tenuous connection the dead may still have with reality. While it’s a film about the existence of ghosts, it’s more interested in the need to believe that ghosts exist. As our loved ones depart, we seek to fill their void with understanding: not just of the questions they left behind in life, but of whether or not we can determine where they’ve disappeared to in death. In either case, such questions remain torturously provocative for the living.
The Palmer family finds disparate, isolated coping methods after the drowning of teenager Alice in the isolated town of Ararat. Father Russell immerses himself in work; mother June, battling insomnia, sneaks into neighbors’ homes to “be someone else for a while.” Brother Mathew takes up photography, eventually capturing eerie images of Alice in time-lapse photos. This discovery unravels hidden secrets within the Palmer family—especially Alice’s—as Anderson’s film reveals just how Alice wasn’t the only one who survived on a regular blend of truth and fiction.
The Palmers’ revelations about the true nature of Alice, her mysterious life, and her seemingly random death ironically only birth further unsettling mysteries. Like Lake Mungo’s opening spiritualist photographs, Mathew doctored reality to give closure to his mother–but couldn’t catch the real ghostly Alice lingering in the background. The revelation of an illicit relationship with the Palmers’ neighbors dries up into an afterthought when Police fail to track them down. And the revelation of a kindly psychic’s connection to Alice in the terrifying days before her death opens up deeper questions about whether familial bonds can transcend time and space. Just as these characters conceal the truth from one another, Lake Mungo suggests that the collective weight of their individual stories of grief and deception points to a deeper, more daunting truth on a cosmic scale—highlighting how each fragment of knowledge only underscores how much remains bound by the limits of their (and our) understanding.
While many found-footage and faux documentaries explore the Faustian pursuit of knowledge, Lake Mungo stands out for grounding this obsession in such deeply flawed, human behavior. It all comes to an ending that’s as heartbreaking as it is horrifying–revealing how the spiritual closure we seek with our loved ones may be more one-sided than we can possibly know.
As this month goes on, you’ll realize that I’m a true found footage/POV junkie, with the faux-doc take on the subgenre among my favorite specific formats. I watch a wide variety of films in the related POV subgenres from widely heralded films to even more widely panned ones, and a host of unknown Tubi gems. It’s truly probably my favorite type of horror film for many reasons.
Lake Mungo is among my favorites. It’s haunting, even if not often “scary” in that jumpscare kind of way. People talk about films like The Witch being all about dread, but it’s movies like this that encapsulate dread for me. The dread finds its friends grief, sadness, despair, and guilt and they work together to make you feel a heaviness that few films are able to really embody.
As a parent, I feel this especially potently. It stings and keeps stinging long after it ends. Truly, a brilliant film with more emotion packed in than anyone is likely to be prepared for.
And we’re out.
OCTOBER: Found Footage Horror Curated by Julian Singleton
October 14 – Incantation (Netflix – 1 hour 51 minutes)
October 21 – Horror in the High Desert (Tubi – 1 hour 22 minutes)
October 28 – Noroi: the Curse (Available on Shudder October 15 – 1 hour 55 minutes)
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Criterion Review: Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy is a Pure shot of 90’s Teen Nihilism
Seeing Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation as an early twenty something industrial fan was easily a foundational viewing of my cinematic development. The happenstance VHS rental at my local Mom and Pop video store of the R-Rated cut, mind you, was pivotal in in creating an interest in indie and transgressive cinema and showed me that indies could push the boundaries far past the mainstream. The film, even in its highly truncated unapproved form, pushed the boundaries of what I knew as cinema, in almost every way shape and form. It was ultra-volent, queer, had singularly one of the best soundtracks ever and it really attempted to explore and capture the goth and industrial subculture of the 90s, in a way a big budgeted film could never.
Thankfully Criterion just released the entire Teen Apocalypse Trilogy on a 4K UHD/Blu-ray set and unless you were lucky enough to catch the restorations that screened at festivals and in cinemas you’ve never seen these films look this good. I was lucky enough to have caught Nowhere at Fantastic Fest last year and found it a revelatory and relevant viewing. The set here contains Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation and Nowhere, which make up the trilogy. While the films don’t have a conventional narrative throughline, they do share a lot of similar themes nihilism, social alienation and this sort of bleak coming of ageness and self and sexual discovery. Also all three films also star James Duval, Araki’s muse who plays a different lead in each one as well.
Now before digging into this set I had never had the pleasure of seeing Araki’s first film in the series Totally F***ed Up, and I am kind of glad that was the case. While Doom and Nowhere have more of a counterculture anti-MTV sensibility, F***ed Up is very much a heady, intellectual indie look at queer dating culture in the early 90s. This was when queer cinema was really breaking through on the 90s festival circuit with films like Go Fish and Paris Is Burning. With a few previous films under his belt, Araki leveraged his experience living in Hollywood, as a gay man during the AIDS crisis, into the first film of the series. It’s a twisted bit of a slice of life, of a group of queer men and women – as they struggle with dating and connection during this time.
Seeing this now, with my current cinema vocabulary, it’s a bit easier to digest and appreciate this film that bridges the early 90s queer boom, to the more conventional offerings that they would inspire and that the later films would infiltrate video stores. F***ed Up follows the sensitive yet completely nihilistic Andy (James Duval), who is basically the male equivalent to the Rose McGowan character in Doom, who one day is picked up and the film follows his relationship with a mysterious college student. He’s surrounded by his close knit support system who all have their own issues, the super couple that faces infidelity, and the lesbians who will stop at nothing to get their first child including bizarre insemination parties.
It’s Andy’s through-line that dictates the film as his urge for self destruction is quelled when he falls in love, but things change, like they always do. It’s a perfect snapshot of a time, with all the requisite 90s friend archetypes, technology and it really sets the stage and lays down the visual style and wordy dialog for the later films.
Next up was The Doom Generation, the film that first introduced me to the director and it wasn’t until watching this restored cut, that I knew I had only been acquainted with the R-rated cut. Doom is like a 90s goth, Easy Rider. But instead of a pair of hippies on bikes smuggling dope, we have two bi-curious men Jordan White (James Duval) and Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech), and Jordan’s girlfriend of 3 months – Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) who aren’t just exploring the American countryside on a killing spree, but their raging teenage sexuality. After kind of accidentally killing a convenience store owner post a night of partying, the three go on the run. If you’ve seen Rider, you know where this is going.
While Doom is definitely more conventional than Totally, it does so with the same unrelenting Nihilism and also biting commentary on America, and even on the very folks this film would be targeted at. My favorite bit of this is, how Amy is constantly mistaken for other women as sort of a commentary on how even in a subculture, you all essentially look the same. This coupled with the film’s bleak look at violence, capitalism and consumerism and growing up in America operates as both a statement and a manifesto. It’s something that definitely deals out the bleakest of the three and a film that in this unrated cut had way more semen and nudity than its R-rated counterpart. But that kind of explains why Araki has publicly disavowed that cut that loses almost 20 minutes of footage.
For those wondering, the primary driving factor of this was probably Blockbuster, which was the largest video retail/rental chain in the US, wouldn’t carry unrated films, since they were touted as a family establishment. They didn’t stock adult films or have back rooms either. So this basically forced distributors with more risqué offerings, to either cut their films or lose that stream of revenue and shelf space altogether. I can see how this would be a very tempting and lucrative get and how smaller distros would be more inclined to make sacrifices to end up on their shelves.
Finally we have Nowhere, where I think Gregg hits his stride seamlessly melding his take on Hollywood from the first film, with the weirdness of Doom, and amping it up to 11 with its surreal Lynchian candy colored lens. The film pulls a page from Dazed and Confused and follows a group of friends in the space of a day as they all try to get to this party. It’s a bizarre, drug fueled trip, but one that really once again touches on the same themes from the previous films. This time, the film features several couples of all sexual orientations as they struggle with the oncoming transitionary period from high school to college. The cast here is insane with the likes of Denise Richards, Traci Lords, Shannen Doherty, Rose McGowan, Rachel True, Christina Applegate, Ryan Phillippe, Heather Graham, Mena Suvari and of course James Duval.
Knowing this film was originally meant as a pilot originally makes so much sense, a nugget of knowledge I gleaned from the bonus features. The film has a twisted episode of the week quality, but channeled through a stream of consciousness narrative. It’s like 90210 on crack and that hits even harder when Brenda herself shows up. It’s definitely the most experimental of the three and shows a real evolution in style and storytelling from the director and you can see him get more adventurous with not only his visual storytelling, but how he crafts a narrative. While Doom is still my favorite of the three, I love the aliens and ditzy valley girls of Nowhere as well.
Like the Once Upon a Time in Mexico set I previously reviewed, this set billed as 4K is a mix of both 4K UHD for the 35mm releases (The Doom Generation and Nowhere) and Blu-ray for the 16mm (Totally F***ed Up). Given the limits of 16mm as a format, this decision for a 2K digital restoration for Totally F***ed Up and a 4K digital restoration for the others is a great one for both practicality from a production standpoint and to help keep costs down. The transfers definitely deliver the quality you’d expect from Criterion and really work to highlight the film’s visual style and heightened color palettes. The scans are crisp with immaculate white balance and contrast, given how much of Doom was shot at night this couldn’t have been an easy feat to keep those blacks from turning into dark grays. But that said the colors here simply explode off the screen, and this is parallel with new 5.1 DTS sound mixes. Given these films weren’t easy to come by, except in the R-rated incarnations, there isn’t a better way to experience them.
As far as extras there’s a decent amount of new interviews with Araki who fondly looks back on these films and the experience of shooting them. He’s often joined by James Duval who’s definitely gotten older, but his enthusiasm for the films is completely infectious as if he was doing his first junket. Their relationship offscreen is definitely palpable from these on screen interviews, as you see a genuine bond between the pair as they recall shooting the films and share behind the scenes anecdotes.It was also a bit surreal to see Araki’s rather charming conversation with Richard Linklater, who the director met while on the festival circuit with Slacker. All the conversations feel very personal and are as informative as they are enjoyable. These films were small labors of love and you can tell that from these interviews and commentaries, where the camaraderie and love for the art really shines through.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 2K digital restoration of Totally F***ed Up and new 4K digital restorations of The Doom Generation and Nowhere, supervised and approved by director Gregg Araki, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks
- One 4K UHD disc of The Doom Generation and Nowhere and two Blu-rays with all three films and the special features
- New conversation between director Gregg Araki and filmmaker Richard Linklater
- New audio commentary on Nowhere with Araki and actors James Duval, Rachel True, Nathan Bexton, Jordan Ladd, Sarah Lassez, Guillermo Diaz, and Jaason Simmons
- Audio commentary on Totally F***ed Up with Araki, Duval, and actor Gilbert Luna
- Audio commentary on The Doom Generation with Araki, Duval, and actors Rose McGowan and Johnathon Schaech
- New documentary on the trilogy’s visual style featuring Araki, Duval, producer Andrea Sperling, cinematographer Jim Fealy, costume designers Cathy Cooper and SaraJane Slotnick, production designer Patti Podesta, art director Michael Krantz, and hair and makeup artist Jason Rail
- James Duval’s Teen Apocalypse Archive, a new conversation between Araki and Duval
- Q&As with Araki, moderated by filmmakers Gus Van Sant and Andrew Ahn
- The Doom Generation video comic book
- Trailers
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Nathan Lee
Getting to re-discover this trilogy in 4K with the Criterion treatment and presentation was an experience filled with nostalgia, appreciation and revaluation. The way Araki, who is obviously queer member of this smaller subculture, is not only commenting on society as a whole, but the microcosm of that scene is impressive to say the least. The film’s have that commentary, but also don’t feel like it’s just for the cool kids either. Having the tools and cinematic vocabulary I do now, there were layers of nuance to the film’s message of youth gone wild that was nothing short of revelatory on these viewings. Everything from the dialog to the visual style showed a profound command of the media that was decades ahead of its time and would color my perception of cinema going forward. It would spark my interest in not only more transgressive indie fare, but LGBT cinema as well, and send me on the hunt for Pink Flamingos next.
Thank you Gregg Araki.
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Fantastic Fest: THE SPIRIT OF HALLOWEENTOWN is a Surprisingly Charming New Addition to Your Holiday Doc Rotation
The Spirit of Halloweentown is the latest by Documentary filmmakers Bradford Thomason & Brett Whitcomb, who some might know from their previous film Jasper Mall, which dug into the remnants of a bygone era of consumerism through a mall that’s in its final throes and it inhabitants. Here they once again have that nostalgic lens looking at a town in St. Helens, Oregon, that has leveraged being once a shooting location of a Disney Channel original movie in 1998, into a yearly 6 week celebration of all things halloween. Given my predilection for all things Disney and the fact that I love a good Halloween doc, I caught the film when it screened at Fantastic Fest and found it as charming as it was empathetic.
Reminiscent of The American Scream, the film follows a group of small town eccentrics leading up to and during the town’s Halloween celebration. The cast of characters include: the flamboyant new owner of the rumored haunted Klondike Tavern, the self proclaimed queen of halloween town, a recently graduated cheer captain, a paranormal investigator and a few others. The film begins with four weeks until Halloween and follows the town’s colorful residents who, as it turns out, all have their supernatural side hustle – from haunted houses to alien museums. The film’s end game slowly comes into focus when the paranormal investigators are tapped to investigate the rumored spiritual phenomena at the Klondike Tavern.
Bradford Thomason & Brett Whitcomb masterfully plant narrative seeds as they weave the stories of the townsfolk together as the days till Halloween tick by. It’s something I didn’t realize until the second time around that there are more than a few questions that set the stage for the film’s final set piece, the Halloween night seance at the Klondike Tavern. Like their previous endeavor the filmmakers are careful to never look down on their subjects or simply exploit them. Instead they carefully craft these character sketches of the sometimes eccentric town folks, ever conscious to never lose sight of their humanity. Some stories will definitely resonate more than others, but with the breadth of subjects shown that’s expected.
With Spooky Season rolling in I can’t recommend this great little doc enough, if it’s playing at a fest near you. While the film easily could spend the entire runtime ruminating on the nostalgia of the inspiration for the event, it instead digs into the more slice of life aspects of its participants. This particular angle lets us discover the event isn’t just an escape for those that come to their town, but for the townspeople themselves, who also look at it as a reprieve from the doldrums of their day to day existence. The Spirit of Halloweentown is a worthy addition to your wholesome Halloween doc rotation, come for the nostalgia, stay for the humanity, and some scares.
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Fantastic Fest 2024: FRANKIE FREAKO is a Hilarious Celebration the Tiny Monsters Sub-genre
Frankie Freako, which just screened at Fantastic Fest and opens in theaters today is a film I’ve been following since its Canadian premiere at Fantasia. The latest by Astron-6 alum Steven Kostanski, who’s made a name for himself after the Canadian film collective called it quits, with the likes of PG: Psycho Goreman, The Void and Manborg to his credit, has the director once again crafting a cinematic love letter to another bygone sub-genre. Frankie Freako is a celebration of Tiny Monster films, specifically the knock offs of Gremlins, which really lends itself to the director’s handmade and sincere style. As a rabid fan of these films, I’ve been very excited to see what Kostanski’s take would be, and its part update and part homage, that feels like the kind of film you’d watch at a pizza party sleepover in the 90s.
The film follows Conor(Conor Sweeney) who is essentially told by everyone in his life he’s boring. While his wife is out of town for work and after being inundated for ads for Frankie’s Freako Phone line, Conor decides to take a walk on the wild side, and call the 900 number. He wakes up the next day to a trashed house and 3 tiny monsters called freakos now inhabiting his home. The film transposes the plot of a child stuck with a group of monsters wreaking havoc while his parents are away, to an adult man who’s wife is away – who’s equally helpless as he struggles to find his inner freak, to prove those folks who think he’s boring wrong. It’s an audacious journey of self discovery powered by Frankie Freako’s trademark Fart Cola.
The film very much tanspries in the rubber suited, stop motion universe Kostanski is known for, but this time around he’s taken the premise and he’s aged his protagonist up a few years. I think that’s important, because the lesson of being yourself and being happy with who you are is one that’s not just for kids in our current social media obsessed world. But it’s also how Connor Sweeney sort of interpolates his character with complete sincerity that hits this point home, he’s meant to be a normal guy who like most of us as he got older started to play it a little safer, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I think that’s what the film is trying to tackle thematically. It’s fine to be yourself even as an adult, even if your cutting loose is simply watching a movie or something more low key.
Frankie Freako is a lighthearted, wholesome and sometimes dark take that feels less like a cringey homage and more like a proper film in the canon. Steven shows a genuine love and familiarity with the tropes and hallmarks of these films, while not talking down or trying to come off as some kind of ironic, meta deconstruction. He’s just out to make the best damn tiny monster movie he can and it isn’t heavy handed with nostalgia, and instead feels confident enough to craft his own story. While it doesn’t overstay its welcome, Freako still checks all the boxes and leave the viewer with hope this isn’t the last time we’ll see the Freakos. As a fan I couldn’t have asked for anything more, and if you feel the same way you will most definitely enjoy this as well.
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Spinema Issue 74: Unboxing and Review of Mastodon’s CRACK THE SKYE (15th Anniversary LE Vinyl + Blu-ray)
Mastodon’s Crack The Skye (2009), their fourth full-length album, found the band now an established entity on the metal scene, garnering acclaim and refining their sound.
For its fifteenth anniversary, the record is being re-released in a number of different double-album configurations which offer multiple ways of enjoying the album, not only in different formats, but as unique audio-visual experiences.
The standard CD and Vinyl editions pair the album with an instrumental version (dubbed “The Score”), allowing you to enjoy the music sans vocals.
The deluxe Limited Editions also pack in a new Blu-ray, offering 2 visual versions of the album as well as its making of documentary. At the top of this heap is the Vinyl + Blu-ray edition, which packs in additional extras including a folded poster and a sheet of magnets.
This review specifically covers the Gold Vinyl + Blu-ray release.
One new component that all editions include is the instrumental version of the album. This is a magnificent record and I’m greatly enjoying the instrumental album as well as the original. I love that Mastodon’s songs – including their vocal performances – have such incredible range: heavy, technical, melodic and graceful. But there’s something to be said for just taking in the music on its own.
Our “Spinema” column is all about the intersection of film and music, and this is a really wonderful example of what that can mean. Some albums feel like a journey, and this one certainly qualifies – even more so in its film versions. The Crack the Skye Blu-ray, featuring three films connected to the album, is a critical piece of this package. While none of the contents are strictly new, having appeared separately elsewhere, this is the first comprehensive package as well as the high-definition debut of the two visual albums. (The Making Of was shot natively on SD video).
The Making of Crack the Skye (2009, 55:40)
Maturity seems to be the theme as the band, now working on a major label and having achieved commercial and critical success, creates their fourth album – trying to be bigger and better without selling out. For example, they describe being able to afford gear that they could only dream about before, such as a Moog synthesizer. The band also describes the themes of the album, which actually goes a long way in adding much needed context to the album’s two film versions.
Crack The Skye: The Movie (2011, 50:10)
The first visual version of the album is a long-format music video which mixes a black and white silent-era expressionist-style movie with animated visuals of the album’s hyper-colorful motifs and fractal designs. Stylistically, it’s kind of a cross between between the imagery of Rob Zombie and Tool. The film mixes elements and motifs of astral projection, Rasputin, and a tour of hell. Because of its abstract nature, it may come off as somewhat incomprehensible, but the “Making Of” helps break down some of the meaning.
Crack The Skye: The 10th Anniversary Tour Film (2019, 50:55)
A second film version of the album was created for the album’s 10th Anniversary. Fully animated, it plays with many of the same concepts and visuals of the album’s artwork and The Movie, also centering on a wheelchair-bound man who astrally projects himself through the cosmos. It’s an interesting complement with its own style, and its finale is stunningly beautiful and even optimistic (something I didn’t necessarily get from the other film).
Unboxing
Here’s a pictorial tour of the Limited Edition vinyl package and its contents.
Outer Box (Unopened)
Outer Box
The entire package is housed in a rigid outer one-piece box. The box does have a proper spine for shelf visibility.
Box Contents (Flipthrough)
Blu-ray 
Booklet 
Magnets, Poster 
LPs Blu-ray
The Blu-ray disc is packed in a simple cardsleeve. The disc also has an inner sleeve, giving it a similar aesthetic to an LP. The sleeve is sealed with a transparent sticker. I was able to remove this and its residue with relative ease without damaging the packaging.
Booklet
Magnets
Poster
LP1 (The Album)
LP2 (“The Score”)
A/V Out
Get it at Amazon:
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Mastodon – Crack the Skye 15th Anniversary Limited Edition 2xLP Vinyl + Blu-ray
Mastodon – Crack the Skye 15th Anniversary Limited Edition Digibook 2xCD + Blu-ray -
JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX: You Get What You Deserve
Joker: Folie à Deux reminds me a lot of the last time Todd Phillips waded into sequel waters to follow up an box office mega hit. Hangover Part ll is a fairly straightforward cashgrab, a copy and paste exercise on autopilot. Hangover Part lll, however, is a different cans of worms. I’m not sure if it’s good, but it’s about as cynical and anti-sequel in its approach as a movie can be. Folie à Deux has Phillips back in this zone, which makes his Joker sequel both more and less interesting than its predecessor.
Folie à Deux, more or less, is a chamber drama split between a courtroom and Arkham Jail. That part may surprise people. The part that isn’t a surprise to anyone who’s paid attention to news on the sequel (and I don’t blame anyone for skipping over those tidbits), is that it’s a musical. Maybe it’s more fair to say it has musical sequences rather than being a full-on song and dance affair. Regardless, Joker is here and he does sing and dance and spend a lot of time in court and in jail.
The bulk of the plot follows the trial of Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix). The bulk of the story is about Arthur’s psyche and the battle between the Arthur and Joker raging inside him. Aiding him along the way is his lawyer, Maryanne (Catherine Keener), Arkham State Hospital patient Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), and prison guard Jackie (Brendan Gleeson). Watching those three bounce off Phoenix is a delight, a sincere highlight in a movie hellbent on undercutting expectations. Gaga makes the strongest impression, but that’s almost a given considering she’s playing the character with the strongest name recognition.
I’m not a big comic person in general so my knowledge of the Harley-Joker dynamic comes from past movies I didn’t care for. So take it with a grain of salt when I say this is the most interested I’ve been in their relationship. The scenes between Gaga and Phoenix are consistently strong. The dichotomy between their stolen conversations within the prison/hospital and the musical set pieces play into the movie’s larger themes of personality and mental health. It’s a simple metaphor and the execution makes it work.
Folie à Deux is a prickly movie that is less of a provocation than Joker. The first movie took on the burden of criticism for its depiction of mental illness and I’m curious if this one draws the same ire. Phillips and Silver double down on the mental health theme without taking as many chances. For the most part Folie à Deux handles its violence differently. There is more figurative or imagined violence than real world violence and that conceit avoids the more direct conflation of mental health and violence that fueled the vitriol aimed at Joker.
Aside from Phoenix and Phillips, most of the key collaborators from Joker are back, including co-writer Scott Silver and composer Hildur Guonadóttir. Between the two movies I think my biggest critique is that they sound more interesting on paper than they end up being on film. Coming off Joker, and the tendency for sequels to go bigger and louder, it’s not hard to picture a version of Folie à Deux that is a Joker and Harley Quinn crime spree movie. Give Phillips and Silver credit for not taking the cheese on that one. No one mistook Joker for a crowd pleaser, but Folie à Deux feels like an act of self-sabotage at times. For that, and Gaga’s performance, I kept help but begrudgingly respect what Folie à Deux serves up.
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Fantastic Fest 2024: The Cinapse Team’s Top 5 Lists
A handful of Cinapse staffers were on the ground in Austin, TX this year for Fantastic Fest 2024! Between us we likely took in over 100 unique films. I myself took in 27 screenings. In other words, we had the best week of our years, as we often do at Fantastic Fest. To wrap up the fest, our team decided to share our own unique “Top 5” lists, in whatever form inspired us. Check out some of our top experiences, screenings, titles, etc!
Ed Travis’ Top 5 Screening Experiences
1: Mac And Me: Look, I booked a ticket to see Mac And Me at Fantastic Fest just to see Mac And Me at Fantastic Fest. I didn’t know it was ultimately going to be a tribute screening for Scott Wampler hosted by Eric Vespe in which Elijah Wood sat and watched the movie for the first time and shared reactions afterwards. Honestly Mac And Me is a revelation to watch with a game crowd. We were dying laughing, jaws agape at the based product placement, and grateful when Alamo Drafthouse employees all brought us McDonald’s cheeseburgers timed to the McDonald’s-based dance number in the film. This was simply the purest and most distilled Fantastic Fest experience I had this year and will live forever in my memory.
2: The Remarkable Life of Ibelin: This one is my top pick for the best film of the fest, but I place it here in this list because I’ll always remember having ordered a cheeseburger and ending up crying so hard for so long while watching this beautiful, sad, touching film, that I could literally taste my tears in my cheeseburger. Disgusting late stage capitalism or Hallmark moment? You decide.
3: The Mission: AGFA pulled a beautiful 35mm print of this Johnnie To Hong Kong classic from their archives and gave us a chance to see this highly influential (and somewhat hard to track down in high quality) film. Riddled with glorious stylistic flourish and that sweet Hong Kong brotherhood any fan of the era appreciates, this felt rare and special amidst all the flashy new movies. And while I thought I had seen The Mission? I think I was wrong, so I’m fairly certain this was my first exposure to this Hong Kong great.
4: Don’t Mess With Grandma: Look, this movie did not blow my mind, though it is cute and a solid display of Michael Jai White’s range. But to be honest, the experience of this one was great because White himself was in attendance and while I don’t geek out and star gaze often at these fests, I did have to make a point to get a pic with Mr. White and thank him for his work. I know not every genre film fan will see him as the towering talent and gift to cinema that I do so I was happy to get a chance to connect with him ever so briefly and fanboy out.
5: Better Man: Fantastic Fest had 5 secret screenings this year and let me tell you, there was not a single solitary soul who guessed that this musical biopic about Robbie Williams (who I’ve literally never heard of, honest to God) and featuring him as a CGI dancing monkey through the entirety of its runtime, was a secret screening. As always happens with something like that, some people walked out or expressed frustration that the pick wasn’t something more conventional like Nosferatu. But I watched a movie I would otherwise have had no interest in, about a talent I’ve never even heard of, and enjoyed an energetic, visually rich musical biopic unlike any I’d seen before and that’s part of the spirit of festivals like these: I put myself into the hands of the programmers and was given a surprising experience unlike anything I would have chosen for myself, and I was pleasantly surprised!
Dan Tabor’s Top 5 Films He’ll Most Want To Revisit
I saw 25 films at Fantastic Fest and find it impossible to do a ranked list since all the films I’ve seen are so different from one another. Some were big budgeted bio-pics (The Apprentice), while some were films made over three years by a group of friends (AJ Goes to the Dog Park). The true test for me personally are films I would want to own after the fact and revisit or share with friends.
Cloud – This film only two acts – fuck around and find out. I never thought a film about an ebay reseller could be so engrossing, but here it is. The film made by a J-Horror icon Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse) has the director applying those tools to a crime thriller to great effect. How the film shifts genres seamlessly amps up an already tense narrative of one man who decides to push his luck selling counterfeit goods to make a quick buck.
She Loved Blossoms More – Imagine The Chronicles of Narnia envisioned as a neo Giallo, but through the lens of Reanimator and you have this film. Stylized to perfection and filled with some spectacular practical effects, the atmospheric tale is a haunting look at loss and regret. Populated by a cast of striking and young actors who do an impressive job at filling the necessary genre archetypes. The narrative here works hand in hand with the visuals to deliver a surreal journey that as a Giallo fan was a rare treat.
Gazer – Gazer is a daring neo noir that flirts with so many sub-genres, as its story slowly unravels on screen. Ryan J Sloan effectively leverages a well-honed and measured narrative, along with every tool in his belt as a director to craft a world captured on celluloid that feels as real as it does dangerous.
Dead Talents Society – This is the film I wish Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was. It’s a razor sharp meta take on Asian ghosts and the afterlife that’s as funny as it is charming. John Hsu, who crafted the tense and horrifying supernatural video game adaptation Detention, is back showing just how well he knows the sub-genre, by turning the sub-genre inside out.
Little Bites – One of my biggest surprises of Fantastic Fest was Little Bites, the latest film by Spider One, lead singer of Powerman 5000 and sibling to Rob Zombie. The film produced by Cher (Yes that one!), stars Krsy Fox and explores domestic abuse through the guise of a vampire film. It’s a bleak and rather heartbreaking portrait of abuse that uses genre as an effective vehicle for delivery.
Jon Partridge’s Top 5 Films
5. The Wild Robot: Some of the most beautiful, fun, and touching animation you’ll see this year. A story that tugs on the heartstrings, a cast that charms, and a soaring score. Just magical.
4. Get Away: The latest from Nick Frost and Steffen Haars delivers folk horror with a gleeful twist. A superb quartet revels in a film that never loses sight of delivering a laugh as well as a dismemberment.
3. Bring Them Down. A tragic thud of a thriller, set between feuding farmsteads in a remote Gaelic community. Taut, tense, and bleak (baaa-leak?) fare, but richly told, with a tremendous lead performance from Christopher Abbott.
2. Better Man: A Robbie Williams biopic with a simian-slant that delivers a gut-punch, tear-jerker, and toe-tapper, all rolled into one.
1. Anora: Beautiful, chaotic, and utterly spellbinding.
Honorable Mentions. Animale. The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee. A Different Man.
Julian Singleton’s Top 5 Emotionally Impactful Films
While the idea of a film festival usually accompanies notions of curated prestige and grandeur, what keeps me coming back to Fantastic Fest year after year is how the festival’s programming team seek out genre films that seek to sear themselves into the memories of their audiences. To shake up the things we love and push us into new, uncomfortable, and imaginative places. By my last count, I managed to fit in 32 films at Fantastic Fest–and while each of them had that spark of something “new,” these were the films whose cumulative impact will be hard for me to shake.
- Anora – Sean Baker’s long-awaited return to the screen since 2021’s raucous, raunchy Red Rocket may be his most chaotic and engrossing slice-of-life film yet. Mikey Madison is an unstoppable force as a New York dancer who undergoes her own 2020s Cinderella story–until reality barrels back in, forcing her and the audience down an unpredictable, heartwrenching, and hilarious rollercoaster ride from Coney Island to Vegas and back.
- The Wild Robot – As someone indebted to being raised between two families, I was a quick mark for Chris Sanders’ dazzling ode to surrogate motherhood. The film’s lush, painterly style juxtaposes sleek, efficient yet soulless technology with the wilds of nature–finding something divine in the growing symbiotic nature between the two. It’s refreshing to see Dreamworks continue their recent hot streak after the fun, touching romps of The Bad Guys and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, but this is easily the most awe-inspiring and memorable of the bunch.
- Cloud – A new Kiyoshi Kurosawa film is always bound to make whatever list I put together, and the revitalization the director has had in 2024 between this, Chime and the still-unseen Serpent’s Path is proof that Kurosawa’s chilling imagination remains boundless. Kurosawa’s always had a sly sense of humor about his work, and it’s exciting to see him lean into that gallows humor as well as a surprising amount of action in this morally ambiguous tale of virtual corruption leading to real-world violence. It’s one thing to be in love with an auteur’s work all your life–it’s another thing entirely to witness them enter a reinvention right before your eyes.
- The Remarkable Life of Ibelin – Speaking of real/virtual analogs, Benjamin Ree’s captivating film may now hold the crown of my deepest emotional reaction to a documentary. At first a tragic snapshot of a seemingly wasted life, Ree turns back time and enters a world unseen by those taking care of Mads Steen, a young man enduring Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. By utilizing years’ worth of gaming logs and actual World of Warcraft game skins, Ree resurrects Mads’ avatar Ibelin, revealing how the teen’s compassion, empathy, and even flaws influenced the lives of countless players across continents. It’s a visceral emotional whiplash from tragedy to life-affirming humanity, urging all of us to seek out new connections no matter our circumstances.
- MadS – I’d be remiss if I didn’t include David Moreau’s single-take stunner on this list. The act of turning into a Zombie is often brushed aside in a single scene of twitchy mayhem before orienting our gaze back onto the survivors. What’s so memorable about MadS is how Moreau and his talented band of performers stretch out the chaos and agony of that transformation, placing us so deeply in the last conscious moments of three teenagers’ lives that each new involuntary twitch becomes an emotional beat, especially as the single take moves like its central virus onto a new victim. It’s physicality as plot, laid gruesomely bare over the most heightened moments of a Zombie film.
HM: Bookworm, Bring Them Down, Better Man, Saturday Night, Dead Talents Society
And We’re Out.
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KINGDOM OF HEAVEN: The Ridley Scott Director’s Cut is the Definitive Crusades Epic [Two Cents]
![KINGDOM OF HEAVEN: The Ridley Scott Director’s Cut is the Definitive Crusades Epic [Two Cents]](https://i0.wp.com/cinapse.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Screenshot-312-1.png?resize=1140%2C486&ssl=1)
Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contribute their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to [email protected].
Any cinephile worth their salt is going to have a soft spot for epic pictures. The grandest tales told on the biggest screens with the hugest visuals conceivable to mankind, and the runtimes to match. This month’s “Epics Revisited” programming highlights the Cinapse team’s curated list of some of our top films that were significantly altered (and improved) by their Director’s Cuts. Often these are titles that are drastically different than what was initially released theatrically.
The Pick: Kingdom of Heaven: The Director’s Cut (2005/2006)
To close this topic out, we go to one of the prime examples of “better in the director’s version” from a filmmaker who’s no stranger to historical epics. Only five years after the Best Picture-winning Gladiator (and, notably, less than four years after 9/11), Ridley Scott delivered a sweeping saga of both cynicism and romance that has a lot to say about waging war in the Middle East. Forced by 20th Century Fox to cut his original version of 194 minutes, Scott had to chop out major character details, entire subplots, and even major players in the story in order to bring it under 2 1/2 hours. Imagine if Fellowship of the Ring were an hour shorter and didn’t include Boromir, and you have an idea of the handicap at play. However, after screening to near-universal acclaim in late 2005, Scott’s Director’s Cut received lavish a 4-disc release in May of 2006, and immediately joined Blade Runner on the shelf of “Ridley can deliver a masterpiece if you don’t screw with him.” Now, it’s more or less accepted as the only version of the film worth considering, and our crack team will spell out why.
The Team
I was deeply moved by the Kingdom of Heaven Director’s Cut. I didn’t bother to revisit the theatrical cut, but recall it having no real impact on me. I can see why a studio would want to chop this down into an action film, and why it really didn’t work in that format. Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven really isn’t a clear cut tale of right versus wrong or good versus evil, or even redemption versus damnation. It’s a nuanced character exploration that requires its epic scope to truly help us see into the hearts and minds of the men and women at its center. Broadly, it is a tale of the Crusades in which the Christian soldiers are the main characters. One could be forgiven for thinking this endeavor unwise. However, Oscar-winning writer William Monahan was up to the task of portraying men and women, Christian and Muslim, healthy and leprous, with humanity and complexity that yields epic emotional payoffs in the midst of massive Crusade warfare–which was never going to be black-and-white enough for mainstream audiences.
Orlando Bloom’s Balian of Ibelin is a complex lead, a murderer who nevertheless does the hard work of redemption and eventually “saves” Jerusalem through compromise. A mutual respect arises between Balian, who is leading the Crusaders in defense of Jerusalem (in a massive and stunning set piece), and his “enemy,” the revered Muslim general Saladin (Ghassan Massoud). Generally, a leader laying down arms and allowing the invading army to grant them safe passage home isn’t the stuff of rallying cries and patriotism. But here in Kingdom of Heaven’s Director’s Cut, we’re given space to see the measure of Men, to understand that character and actions matter, and the victory of lives saved and sacred cities left intact becomes clear.
Not only that, Balian and Saladin’s appreciation for the humanity of the other, and the character they’re willing to display against baser desires for bloodlust, has much to say to modern audiences. To be clear, this isn’t a diatribe on the virtues of compromise (nor is the film), but rather Monahan seems to be extolling the virtues of character, and a willingness to make hard choices that aren’t immediately expedient. Balian’s long and painful journey grants him many opportunities to sacrifice, to lead, to learn, and to trust. It resonates deeply today in a landscape starving for these virtues.
I happen to be in the very fortunate position of having only ever seen the extended director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven. I’d seen bits and pieces of the theatrical on cable and knew its reputation as a lackluster, severely compromised effort in the midst of a pretty historic run for Sir Ridley. When I finally did sit down and watch the director’s cut, it immediately skyrocketed to the top of my personal rankings of Scott’s films.
I’ll be honest: Ridley has typically been a director I admire more than I especially love. Alien is a masterpiece like no other, but other highly regarded entries in his career (your Blade Runners, your Gladiators) don’t really do anything for me. There’s a lot I appreciate about those movies, but they never connect on any real emotional/visceral level.
Kingdom of Heaven, though, Kingdom of Heaven is rich and messy and human in all the ways that Scott can typically be cold and cordoned off. In depicting the siege of Jerusalem, Scott finds empathy for each side of the conflict and for the participants at every level. From kings wrestling with the fates of nations to lowly soldiers just trying to scrape their way to survival, Kingdom of Heaven builds a tapestry of our imperfect and quarrelsome species and mounts the argument that if God is anywhere, He/She/It/Them resides in those imperfections and in those quarrels.
Alien may still clinch that top spot (because, well, it’s Alien), but Kingdom of Heaven is epic cinema at a scale and skill level beyond easy comparison.
“What man is a man who does not make the world better?”
Kingdom of Heaven is perhaps the Ridley Scott film whose difference between theatrical and extended versions couldn’t be more stark. While the original version was a disjointed and melodramatic mess, the director’s cut transforms it into a profound exploration of faith, religion, and power, set against the backdrop of the Crusades. Coupled with its roadshow format, restoring an Overture and Intermission, Kingdom of Heaven feels so damn momentous, a cinematic event whose epic runtime, intricate details, and thematic depth make it stand apart as Ridley Scott’s best film.
Seen through the eyes of Orlando Bloom’s artificer-out-of-water Balian, audiences leave the grim, frozen comforts of France to be plunged into the towering battles and shadowy intrigue of the Crusades. Echoing the blend of ordinary characters and extraordinary circumstances of his later Oscar-winning screenplay The Departed, William Monahan expertly balances the staggering scale of combating religions with the more intimate, personal conflicts of Balian and those who surround him. The film opens as a father reconciling with a son and evolves into that son evolving his father’s legacy, gradually expanding in scope to entwine the personal and romantic with the political, cultural, and divine. This intricate blend grounds us deeply in Scott and Monahan’s take on such a turbulent era of religious and social history, making larger social shifts frequently hit home as the only the best epic tales can do. There’s so many wonderful little character details, too, that speak to the level of Kingdom of Heaven’s historical research as well as Scott and Monahan’s dedication to fully realizing the world of their story. Whether it’s children placing toy boats in the flows of newly-constructed aqueducts, Balian reacting to seafood like first seeing aliens, or a Viking using his braids as napkins during a campfire meal, there’s so much in Kingdom of Heaven that makes it feel like an organic, vibrant world.
What makes Kingdom of Heaven Ridley Scott’s best film, though, is its nuanced depiction of religion, succinctly distinguishing between systems of belief and control. Released at the height of the Iraq war “Crusade,” Kingdom of Heaven refuses to oversimplify its characters to fit cartoonish definitions of good and evil in ways that mirrored current foreign policy. Christians and Muslims alike span wide spectrums of heroic and corrupt, with plenty of them willing to rely on their faith to justify atrocities. The scene where Templars devolve into chants of “God wills it!” is particularly chilling, as they use religion to rationalize their greed. Scott and Monahan also grant Kingdom of Heaven an ambiguously supernatural perspective in David Thewlis’ Hospitaler/Angel, who sharply critiques these hypocritical institutions while emphasizing moral integrity. Where Balian goes to spiritually significant places and feels nothing, the Hospitaler sources true holiness not in iconography or ritual, but in actively deciding to be a good person–which stands in sharp contrast to the violence around him, offering moral clarity amid chaos. It’s Scott quantifying and questioning his audience’s demands for epic violence to match an epic tale, a through-line makes the film’s ending not one of failure, but one of immense grace and true power.
It’s a bold moral stand at a time of immense political and religious division, and it’s not surprising that Kingdom of Heaven’s calls for compassion went unheard during its original butchered release. The film’s themes of faith and power are more relevant today than ever, and its technical and narrative depth cement Kingdom of Heaven as the crown jewel of Ridley Scott’s near-unparalleled body of work.
My first thoughts on seeing the theatrical cut of this film in May of 2005 were, to paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirate King from Penzance, “there are the remains of a great movie about Kingdom of Heaven.” It was immediately apparent that there was serious filmmaking muscle behind this venture, from Harry Gregson-Williams’ soaring score to the climactic siege of Jerusalem that–even in the compromised cut–stood out as a set piece for the ages. And it was the film that made me pay attention to Eva Green just before she took her place as one of the greatest strengths of the rebooted James Bond franchise in 2006’s Casino Royale. However, every time the film seemed to be about to say something interesting, it would abruptly cut itself short and rush to the next scene, often jumping through narrative at a pace so uneven or with so little satisfying build-up that the end result was muddied and frustrating.
Then I saw the “real” version of the movie, and it was crystal clear both why it was cut down but also why it never should have been. Epics like Braveheart and Gladiator are far more narratively immediate and viscerally satisfying than what Scott is attempting here. However, that complexity and the film’s refusal to give the audience an easy out is what makes it so rich in the context of its time and so enduring nearly twenty years later–at least to most. Axel and Ulric of Geeks With Shields write “The Director’s cut of the movie does a lot to clean up the weird story beats. But doesn’t really solve the core issues of bad history and the weird, not subtle, political subtext. Ridley Scott is a director capable of making great films. Just not ones with a historical setting.” And Kingdom of Heaven will absolutely throw historical accuracy to the side in favor of the narrative, and often has little time for subtlety. This is a story about the great and little evils that people do in pursuit of their desires, from power to redemption to basic human connection, and the script by The Departed‘s William Monahan balances a wide ensemble circling the throne of the titular Kingdom, and while it features several outright villains, it steadfastly doesn’t pick a side as “right.” This movie looks the audience square in the eye and says that fighting for wealth and land in the Middle East is a fool’s errand, and that all have claim to Jerusalem.
It’s also asking a lot of Orlando Bloom, who is especially ill-served by the theatrical version essentially speed-running him through a very basic “Redemptive Hero’s Journey” and resulting in him being the least interesting piece on a board populated by some of the best actors of their time. However, the Director’s Cut of the movie lets you into Balian’s journey from emotionally-ravaged blacksmith and socially awkward engineer to a leader who commands the respect of kings. The shorter version is unable to dull Green’s movie star charisma, but robs her Queen Sybilla of most of her complexity (not to mention all the scenes her son) as well as the deliberate parallel grief she comes to share with Balian. What seems perfunctory cliche in the version that hit theaters becomes a melancholy romance poignant in its depiction of broken people finding a way to scrape a bit of happiness from the uncaring jaws of war.
Kingdom of Heaven has been fortunate to outlive its theatrical failure, standing as a monument to Scott’s talent as a filmmaker who can deliver period battlefields of massive siege towers and thundering ballistas as effectively as intimate character moments where a drop of spilled wax can shatter a person’s entire world. It’s a film that calls for communication and understanding amid greed and fanaticism and the lust for revenge, and insists that its never too late to rise above what we thought we were.
That’s going to close us out for our Best Forgotten Epics. Many thanks to everyone who contributed to ensure that these gems don’t go undiscovered for long.
OCTOBER: Found Footage Horror Curated by Julian Singleton in Honor of His NOROI Commentary Track
We couldn’t be more proud that our friend and colleague Julian Singleton had the opportunity to record a commentary track on his favorite horror film Noroi: the Curse for a major upcoming home video release from Arrow Video: J-Horror Rising! In celebration of Julian’s passion we’re dedicating spooky month to exploring some of his top found footage recommendations.
October 7 – Lake Mungo (Tubi – 1 hour 28 minutes)
October 14 – Incantation (Netflix – 1 hour 51 minutes)
October 21 – Horror in the High Desert (Tubi – 1 hour 22 minutes)
October 28 – Noroi: the Curse (Available on Shudder October 15 – 1 hour 55 minutes)And We’re Out.
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Fantastic Fest 2024: Chatting with Zoë Bell for RAZE’s 10 Year Anniversary
One of my favorite things that transpired this year was getting to sit down and chat with Zoë Bell who was at Fantastic Fest repping the 10th anniversary of Raze. For those that haven’t seen Raze, it’s the story of a group of women who are kidnapped and forced to fight to the death on camera for a group of wealthy men led by Doug Jones who watch from the shadows. Each woman has someone who’s life depends on their participation and Zoë Bell plays Sabrina, a veteran who is brought into the tournament and is just trying to see her daughter again. While the first time I saw the film years ago, I enjoyed the film simply for its gnarly hand to hand battle, watching it today, it’s hard to ignore the subtext of a group of women forced to fight one another for the entertainment of a group of wealthy men.
With nearly a decade experience and perspective now under her belt, it was great to chat with Bell about her role as not only Sabrina, but as a producer. I soon discovered I wasn’t too far of the mark at my take on the film and Bell also informed me on how she influenced the film for the better. If you’re a fan of Raze Bell drops some great bits on not only the development from short to feature, but the production and the ending, which Quentin Tarantino didn’t hold back about how he felt about it.
You were doing this thing that was kind of unheard of at the time where you were transitioning from a stunt woman into a leading woman. So what was that experience like for you?
Zoë Bell: You know, Death Proof was it really. But I dunno quite if this sounds how it should, but it wasn’t really my choice. Like, I certainly hadn’t gone as a stunt woman, I would like to graduate into acting – I had been interested in the idea more while doing Kill Bill, it was Quentin’s fault, basically. It’s entirely Quentin’s fault. I’ve had this thing, like if I’m feeling like, ‘oh, I don’t wanna do it’, and I recognize that feeling and then I recognize it as fear. Once I’ve recognized it as fear, the other voice in my head is like, ‘wow, now you’re gonna have to do it’.
Dan: Zoë Bell has fear?
Zoë Bell: Hell yeah, she does. Sorry, is that really disappointing? (laughs) Acting scared the sugar outta me. Still does, terrifies me. But once I did that, then I was like, I kind of have to pursue this a little bit more. Raze came to me as a short film, which was basically Rachel Nichols was the lead and at the very end I come in, we have the fight, and that was the end of the short.
But as we were raising money, and this is now a long time ago, and it was my first time as a producer, so it’s a bit hazy. But I said I would come on as a producer, because I wanted to have some insight as to what happens in that part of the process. I had always been afraid of the production office.
I was like, Ugh, don’t go there. I don’t know. It’s money and numbers and people in suits and so I was like, fuck it. I should probably find out a little bit about it. So I got involved as a producer and then I don’t even remember how it came about. Some of the conversation we were like, well shit, if we get a little bit more money, we could make it into a feature and I would be the lead of that. And as a producer it was my first time really being like, ‘oh, I have some insight and I want to have a voice in this character, the story and the development of both of those things’. That was when I went, ‘Ooh, this is like crack’. I want more of that, I love the collaboration, it’s sort of like doing a puzzle, you know?
When the premise first came to you, what was your thoughts on it? Because, for me its kind of, this metaphor for the way men sort of view women in the entertainment industry. How you’re all sort of like put in this battle royal out to fight it out.
Zoë Bell: It’s just basically every audition room in La (laughs)
That’s exactly what I thought I was watching, it for this interview. I remember watching it when it first came out, but watching it now, that subtext really jumped out at me and it was still as relevant as ever. What kind of influence as a woman coming into this project over the script and what not?
Zoë Bell: Lots. I was deeply involved in that and I remained very appreciative of that and I thoroughly enjoyed the process and found it really satisfying for exactly what you are alluding to. When it first came to me, it was definitely more like women in prison. Like pin-up, get your tits out. No judgment about those movies and their existence.
No. If you’re doing exploitation, you’re doing exploitation, that’s fine.
Zoë Bell: Hundred percent.
But the thing is, is like the players are even rather conservatively dressed.
Zoë Bell: That was me. That those outfits are mine. I was like, I already know I want ’em in white wife beaters and gray sweats. Like that was just the, and I want ’em all in the same outfit.
In Raze, stunt performer and actress Zoe Bell plays Sabrina, a woman kidnapped and forced to fight for her life in an underground tournament. And some rolled it up their one pants leg, which back in the day meant you were a Billy Badass.
Zoë Bell: Its like the school uniform. That’s how you get to see people’s personalities is how they wear the clothes they’re given. Even though they’re all the same, you still see different things about them. That was really appealing to me, and there was something about the whole sort of the dehumanizing of these women by making them all wear the same thing. There is something, innate, especially when it’s done in a negative connotation and situation such as being imprisoned and forced, to fight to the death (laughs). It’s inherent. So, when we started developing it for me, I was like, ‘Hey, if I’m playing Sabrina, you know, like the street fighter of it all, how do we, how do we avoid that trope or how do we do something different?’
If we are doing this as women, very few women in my life, just because it’s a tournament would willingly kill people. Like in order to get to the place where they are committed to killing someone, especially an innocent person and another female, that’s not showing them any danger except for they’re under the same duress. I was like each of these women have to have a reason. Like what would mine be? And for me at the time, I was like, it’s my brother. Like if you had my brother, I will kill you. If I can, any other situation just about, I don’t know that I would be able to bring myself to do it.
Once we started tapping into that, then it was like, ‘Ooh, what if each of these women has someone?’ So it’s really like, you don’t have a choice, if you don’t fight or you don’t win, that person dies, like that. Now you’re talking about, that drive to fight and to kill is coming from somewhere real. That was an important piece for me also. Then it’s like, oh, this is interesting. Like if you’ve got a young girl who’s never fought before. How would she fight if you’ve got someone who’s a soldier, who knows how to fight, does she want to hold back? Is she willing to, you know. So, it just became like using action in pursuit of character study was really engaging for me.
Speaking of which, how involved were you in the choreography of the fights, because there’s a conscious effort to make sure not to lose the performances of the characters and maintaining them throughout the fights?
Zoë Bell:I was very involved with fights, obviously. James (Young), our coordinator is a champion. He’s gone on to do, like Marvel stuff. He’s a British guy. He is amazing and was really, open to, I mean I had very honest conversations with him, where I was like, I’m definitely gonna have a lot of opinions. Don’t take it personally collaborative is my jam. But, I definitely have very strong thoughts about these things and I know what I’m wanting, what I’m looking for. You know, he was really cool about it and very open about it, which was great. I dunno if he had a choice, but he did very well with not having a choice. He’s just brilliant in terms of piecing together choreography as well. So when I was speaking I could see him going, oh, I understand what you mean.
A huge part of what we do is interpreting what someone’s vision is and then giving it back to them as best we can. Yeah. And he did a great job of that. For me as a performer, it was great actually because it was like getting to use my physicality, which has for a long time had been my comfort zone. That is my place of peace. Ironically, (laughs), you know, as an athlete, that’s that place that I know achieving it is the goal. I know I’m capable. It’s just a matter of getting to it, or completing it, but using my physicality to access that kind of emotion was something that had come about. I think I’d been doing it my whole life, just not consciously and then on Kill Bill Quentin sort of made me conscious of it in a way that then I got to really play with and raise it.
I have to ask have you ever kicked somebody’s ass in real life?
Zoë Bell: In real life? No, I punched a guy once. Well, I guess I, I punched him, and I put him on the ground. So I guess it worked, but it was just one punch. He definitely was asking for it.
The irony is I’ve never liked sparring. I’m that girl who would be sparring, but every time I actually made a connection I would apologize. I’m like, ‘oh, sorry’. I don’t get a kick out of hurting people. Taking hits is like, yeah, it’s not my favorite thing, obviously, but it’s not something I’m unaccustomed to and if I’m in the mode, it’s just part of the parcel. But I struggle watching fights still. If I’m in the wrong mind frame or I see someone’s parent looking like at their kid getting, hit. I’m about to emotionally throw up. I’m definitely not a fighter mind at, at all. And I know that’s disappointing for a lot of people.
Finally, was that always the ending? Like, it’s bleak, but was that always the ending?
No, it wasn’t always the ending. And again, it’s sort of vague now, the actual process that we went through. But my memory is, I mean, this is a spoiler alert! But we had definitely discussed her surviving and it was definitely, Josh, the director felt pretty strongly that she shouldn’t. He had his reasons that that made sense to me at the time. I was definitely all for her surviving. I definitely had sort of as a beginner, as a baby lead actress, also being a stunt girl and being from New Zealand – I shied away from being like, she should survive because I made it about me. So in my head I was like, I don’t wanna be fighting so that my character doesn’t die. Like if he creatively wants her to die, I had no ego in it.
But my desire to make it clear that I didn’t have an ego, stopped me from sort of speaking creatively as loudly as maybe I would have. Also, I wasn’t the director on this movie. People have very varied responses to the ending. Quentin rang me having seen this movie in the theater, which was, oh, I so stoked, he went to see it in the theater last day it was in theaters. He rang and left a voice message and he was super complimentary about it compared it to Battle Royale, which is high praise coming from him, ’cause it’s one of his favorites.
He basically was like, some amazingly complimentary Battle Royale reference and then he said, but I fucking hate the ending! (laughs). I was like, oh bugger, I get it. His thing was spoiler alert again. But his thing was, if you’re gonna flip up a card that says “Sabrina versus everyone”, she needs to just kill everybody. (laughs). And if you put the audience and Sabrina through what you’ve put everyone through, you deserve her to win. I was like, that’s really interesting, especially coming from him. ’cause he is not averse to like, flipping an, an ending, you know?
