The Alamo had a special showing of Black Site , an 2018 indie movie I knew very little about going in. Ultimately, I liked the premise, a few of the actors, and some of the beats, but the villain was tedious and it was generally a fairly amateur production. Still, not bad for $3.50 or so a ticket (it was $7 on a buy-one-get-one deal) and as we were among maybe four or five people in the audience, we ended up with a good bit of the promo basket the theater owner brought in. So I came home with a DVD of Lasso, a movie described as follows: “A tour group outing turns deadly when the crazed, bloodthirsty cowboys from a local rodeo attraction start abducting and killing people!” Sold.
Okay, okay, I’ll talk about Black Site a little more. Basically, the premise (as unfortunately laid out in an opening voiceover/title montage - this should have been ditched) is that there are Elder Gods. Humanity managed to kick them out with magic, but they came back, and so a secret military force known as Artemis was established to hunt them down and “deport” them back into the other universe where they were banished. We are told that once deported they never come back ('cause that sure stuck the first time? IDK). Artemis maintains black sites where the deportation happens, and the movie is set in one of them. They’re theoretically very secure, with wards against combustion and “electrified light field” defenses, but Artemis is winding down since they’ve deported most of the Elder Gods at this point and mostly the black sites are just a dead end post, underfunded and boring (and because there’s no combustion, there’s no hot water or smoking) except on the rare occasions a deportee is brought in. Our heroine’s parents were killed by an Elder God named Erebus, and he’s just been captured and brought to the black site for deportation. Except of course his cult is on the way to rescue him, and he’s established some sort of occult connection with her that makes her presence dangerous, and…basically it’s her and a doofy British guy (the deportation officer) fighting their way through a bunker full of tunnels and masked cultists (also one with one eye, ninja gear, and two katanas) while Erebus monologues in extremely cliched fashion to her boss and a field team operative that helped raise her.
And you know, it’s kinda fun. The movie is best when it’s deploying its sense of humor, okayish when she’s fighting, boring when it’s trying to establish the Elder God as scary or otherworldly in any way.
Edit: I guess it was at a festival in 2018, but the wider release (insofar as it’s getting one) just hit. So it’s a 2019 movie in my book!
It was an obvious nod to Escape from New York. Which is lost on you youngsters these days! Get off my lawn!
Dude, you’re burying the lede! The “no combustion” thing was used to justify all the punchkick fighting in lieu of gunplay. No combustion means guns don’t work, which is why everyone has to punch each other or use stun batons or swords. That one silly little plot detail is the justification for how this this movie imagines itself as the equivalent of Indonesian fight movies like The Raid.
I do like it when movies cast women with an obvious background in stuntwork to be their badasses. Seem to me that was the movie’s main agenda. Kickass women kicking ass. There was some solid physicality here! Too bad they tried to force it into a no-budget amalgam of Lovecraft and Escape from New York, neither of which really worked. :(
Festivals never count as release dates when it comes to making lists! Black Site is most definitely a 2019 movie!
-Tom
EDIT: Ooops, the whole reason I posted was to suggest a much better low-budget Lovecraft movie. I was hoping Black Site would be more like this:
For sure, see it. Totally grim and tense most of the way through. In movie crit speak, it’s pretty much the kind of movie that the word “gripping” was invented for.
Ok, another “this isn’t a 2019 movie actually but I saw it in a theater in 2019 so fuckit” post.
My local Alamo had an “AGFA Secret Screening” tonight, free with purchase of a $5 drink/food voucher, the identity of the film undisclosed. And so it was that I and a friend saw a newly restored 4K print of Brain Damage, a 1988 film from the director of Basket Case and Frankenhooker, in the second largest theater in the house, amidst a sea of Avengers Endgame showings.
I had not heard of Brain Damage prior to this screening (although I had certainly heard of Basket Case, which they will be showing at the end of the month). On balance…I think I liked it? It’s a really weird movie, with a lot of goofy shit that brought loud laughter theaterwide, mixed with some pretty intensely uncomfortable scenes. For example, the monster, a drug-secreting mutant worm thing that eats brains, is impossible to take seriously between the, uh, technically existent SFX, the googly eyes, the pleasant conversational voice, and the scene where it breaks into song. Oh, and when we first see it, it comes into view and announces, “Hi!”. There’s some really hammy overacting. The lead actor is required to make faces of orgasmic pleasure for minutes on end, and jumps around like a total weirdo when demonstrating how high he is.
…and then there’s scenes like the one where he hooks up with a girl at this club and goes into the boiler room with her and she goes to go down on him and…it’s the worm in his pants. And we linger on the results for…quite a while, really. Or where he starts picking at something in his ear and things go…poorly…from there.
And that ending. Boy. What.
PS: My first clue that this was the guy that did Basket Case (which for the record I have not seen) was the main character from Basket Case sitting on the subway across from this movie’s main character with a wicker basket.
Brain Damage is one I’ve always meant to see. Gonna have to get to that, cause it looks pretty bonkers.
Tonight I finally got around to renting Climax: Gaspar Noe’s most recent entertainment. Whatever you think of Noe, there’s no doubt he’s a master of the form. That form being stylish cinematic maximalism. This isn’t quite his best movie (still Enter The Void, imo), but it’s damn good and will most certainly hold your attention, to say the least!
Bonus: if you’ve ever been on a bad trip, it will probably bring back some really terrible memories.
Hey me too, though last night and not tonight 28 days ago. I’ve always kind of lurked on the sidelines of Gaspar Noe films without ever actually dipping my toes in. But Sofia Boutella can drag me into any film, and I’m a fan of avant-garde horror, so I took the plunge and… hmmm. I think it would have been a very good film if it hadn’t had the kid in it. That whole subplot (I use the word “subplot” here loosely. The film doesn’t really have a plot.) was just extremely hamfisted compared to the rest of the film, and it wasn’t necessary for the horror atmosphere. In fact, it detracted from it because of how thundering the foreshadowing was. I also couldn’t decide if the meta-structure of the film (e.g. the credits, titles, interviews, etc) was actually cool or a little too cute. I lean actually toward cool. And there were about a half-dozen too many characters to actually keep track of them for 90 minutes, though Noe does an admirable job at actualizing all of them with those conversation segments.
All that said, I watched it beginning to end and was never bored. And it successfully communicated the dread, helplessness, and desperation of the characters. Brilliant choice to use a long, hyperreal documentary style tracking shot rather than surrealism or psychedelia. Also, dear god, Sofia Boutella is brilliant.
Saw an advance screening of Midsommar just now. The trailer is actively (and I think deliberately) misleading, though I shan’t say how. But definitely very atmospheric, pretty, fucked up folk horror. If folks have seen Hereditary, they’ll have some idea what kind of content warnings are appropriate here (except it’s all adults this time). Also maybe Hannibal (the series)? Lots of weird, creepy folk drawings, unsettling customs. Psychoactive drugs. Flowers. Abrupt transitions. I wasn’t ever precisely scared, and I didn’t quite gel with the ending (the content is fine, I just feel like it could have been handled a little more deftly), but I think it’s very worthwhile overall.
