Dir - Raul Garcia
Overall: GOOD
Spanish animator Raul Garcia combined several shorts along with a linking segment together to make Extraordinary Tales, yet another Edgar Allan Poe anthology. Though Garcia directed and adapted each story himself, the digital animation style of each one is considerably different and all of them lend themselves appropriately to Poe's Gothic, macabre material. Naturally, some are better than others with probably "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" making the best impression and "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Masque of the Red Death" trailing a bit farther behind by comparison. The most pleasantly surprising though is "The Tell-Tale Heart", due to it being narrated by none other than Bela Lugosi over a half-century since his death. Lugosi's dramatic reading was presumably taken from a 1947 radio broadcast, but along with the props deserved to Garcia for scoring it here, he also manged to get horror heavyweights Sir Christopher Lee and Guillermo del Toro on board for further narrations. The whole is pretty consistent, though the only complaint one could launch at it is due to the overwhelming familiarity with the material at this point. All of the stories are iconic in Poe's catalog and have been adapted numerous times by now and Tales inadvertently becomes just slightly unengaging because of this.
Dir - Zack Parker
Overall: MEH
Badly written and badly acted, Zack Parker's to-date latest feature Proxy pulls off once nifty surprise, but blows any and all of its potential everywhere else. Just shy of halfway into the movie, something genuinely unexpected happens and up until that point, you could assume that Parker knew where he was going with the material. Yet what follows this scene simply leaves all of its proposed questions dangling in the wind. There are very disturbing events that go down in Proxy and more than one main character seems to posses layers to their psyche and motivation that the film itself only poses to you before moving on to something else. The script is terribly illogical and it is the reason that Parker's would-be ambiguous story comes off sloppy and incredibly underwritten. We are simply left thinking "well, I guess these people are just crazy". It is hard to give a shit when the shits were not given to really dive into what is going on here. The cast unfortunately does more to get in the way than not. Joe Swanberg, (who has been rather stiff in a number of sub-par indie horror movies this century), is the biggest problem probably, but there are more peculiar, unconvincing line readings from the rest of the cast as well. Everything seems off and unfinished and it is a tad insulting since there are some highly unpleasant visuals here that end up being totally not worth sitting through in the end.
Dir - Calvin Reeder
Overall: MEH
A very confused, unfocused road movie, Calvin Reeder's The Rambler is a near textbook offender of style over substance. It is filled top to bottom with meaningless, random dialog, emotionless characters, and freaky, unexplained visuals, but unlike a master like David Lynch per example, Reeder seems utterly lost as to what to do with all of his ingredients. They are simply there to look at and listen to with absolutely zero attempt made to validate their inclusion. Dermot Mulroney in the lead is so impassive to everything that happens to him that if he seems completely unmoved by it all, why shouldn't we also be unmoved? The film's humor is dry to an absolute fault. Mulroney meets people and walks into towns were arbitrary, horrifying things go down and in every instance he eventually just gets bored and picks up his guitar to walk off onto the next encounter. It is not just that there is something missing to all of this; there seems to be EVERYTHING missing to it. Either pushing the silliness or the horror elements further and having any relatable or natural characters present at all could have put things in some kind of penetrable framework, but The Rambler, (appropriately to its title), just rambles along and becomes all but offensively boring by the end of it.
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