Dir - Joshua Erkman
Overall: MEH
Overall: MEH
Promising yet unfocused at regular intervals, co-writer/director Joshua Erkman's full-length gritty road nightmare debut A Desert presents a barren American landscape where people find hollow brutality in place of anything substantial. To be fair, the tale here by Erkman and fellow screenwriter Bossi Baker seems to deliberately present a type of No Country for Old Men outcome, where evil people do evil things within their own unexplained parameters, in a Western landscape no less. The film also teases at the phenomenon of liminal spaces, opening with a down-on-his-luck photographer who takes a throwback trip through the Southwest to capture empty movie theaters, military bases, rustic scenery, or the rugged people that he comes across. Unfortunately for him, two of these rugged people are redneck psychopaths straight out of a Rob Zombie Tobe Hooper knock-off, and from the moment that they arrive, the film careens towards an unwholesome and murky climax that touches on both psychological ambiguity and torture porn. Jay Keitel's cinematography is commendable, plus Erkman makes some fresh choices along his route, but the story never makes its ugliness compelling.
Dir - Kōji Shiraishi
Overall: MEH
One of writer/director Kōji Shiraishi's detours from mockumentary found footage, Sayuri, (House of Sayuri), pushes some of the filmmaker's quirky aspects to the forefront in an experimental framework that switches gears completely midway through. The narrative and most of the proceedings follow a by-the-books haunted house formula of the J-horror variety. A family moves into a new place, weird things happen that no one mentions to anyone and/or speaks of again, characters get possessed, the senile grandma seems to sense sinister stuff as does a girl that the oldest teenage son goes to school with, and things go tragic quick. There is a stock if effective mood throughout these moments that is deadly serious and going for chills, but Shiraishi abruptly changes directions just when things are at their most harrowing, moving into an absurd buddy comedy between Ryoka Minamide and Toshie Negishi. The latter portrays the usually mentally debilitated grandmother who inexplicably transforms into a chi-training, smoking, kidnapping, violent, cackling hippy badass until the supernatural entity of the title is defeated. Shiraishi subverts as many cliches as he adheres to and seems to be having fun while swinging in desperately different directions, but he also seems like he cannot decide what type of movie to make, so he instead just makes two of them, one at a time. It is hilariously uneven, just probably not for the reasons that were intended.
Dir - Thordur Palsson
Overall: MEH
Ridden with jump scares and/or screeching noise stings to announce every last would-be "scary" visual moment, the full-length debut The Damned from Icelandic filmmaker Thordur Palsson, (Þórður Pálsson), is otherwise grim and snow-bound folk horror done with emotional sincerity. An international co-production between various countries, it is set some time during the 19th century in a remote arctic fishing outpost, its isolated characters facing destitute during a rough winter season which is exasperated when they are unable or unwilling to help those from a sea vessel that becomes stranded nearby. The central theme is how desperation manifests all-consuming fear as everyone succumbs to a form of mania that is often times brought on by a seemingly supernatural presence that again, announces itself with blaringly loud volume swells on the soundtrack. This particular hack trope is egregious in any production, and it sadly undermines the relentlessly humorless tone here instead of enhancing it. The committed performances and location photography are commendable though, capturing the harsh yet striking landscape, not to mention a bygone era where charitable deeds were punished by that very landscape.
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