Inland Empire (2006): written and directed by David Lynch; starring Laura Dern (Nikki Grace/ Susan Blue), Jeremy Irons (Kingsley Stewart), Justin Theroux (Devon Berk/ Billy Side), Karolina Gruszka (Lost Girl), Grace Zabriskie (Visitor #1), and Harry Dean Stanton (Freddie):
A doomed Polish film adaptation of a creepy, true Polish folk tale inspires an American film directed by Brit Jeremy Irons and starring Laura Dern and Justin Theroux. Real-life events begin to mirror those in the adaptation which mirror those surrounding the original film which mirror those in the folk tale that was inspired by true events.
Also, dance numbers and a surprise cameo from Terry Crews!
Laura Dern's actress begins to be haunted almost immediately by strange characters, events, and an occasional loss of self. And by living out life as her character. Or is the character really a character or the ghost of a person doomed by a curse to relive the events of her death over and over until someone breaks the curse? Good question!
Inland Empire is a disturbing, dazzling descent into horror, madness, and parallel lives and worlds. However, you may have to consult its wikia page to figure out its plot. Or watch it several times.
Even then, this is Lynch prowling the borders between dream and narrative, nightmare and plot. Laura Dern is terrific in a role that requires a lot of heavy lifting in service of a character with more than one character. Cameos come and go. Grace Zabriskie shows up early and late to explain things and terrify Laura Dern's actress. Harry Dean Stanton has a recurring comic bit as a scam-artist assistant to director Jeremy Irons. Mary Steenburgen wanders through.
And there's the rabbits. Or people with rabbit heads. Surreal, menacing WTF mind games from David Lynch. I've come to the opinion that all of Lynch's work takes place in the same universe. Or multiverse. The monster here could just as well have strolled through Twin Peaks: The Return or Eraserhead. Or maybe it did! Highly recommended.
Red State (2011): written and directed by Kevin Smith; starring Michael Angarano (Travis), Nicholas Braun (Billy-Ray), Ronnie Connell (Randy), Stephen Root (Sheriff Wynan), Melissa Leo (Sara), Kerry Bishe (Cheyenne), Michael Parks (Abin Cooper), John Goodman (ATF Agent Keenan), and Kevin Pollak (ASAC Brooks):
Kevin Smith's bleak satire of sex, religion, and politics in America is one of his three or four best films. He's stripped the narrative of all sentimentality, which is simply my way of saying 'Don't get too attached to any of the characters!' This results in a lot of truly shocking moments, but one which does not celebrate or valorize violence or nihilism.
What you have are three randy teen-aged boys, bored with high school and life, and on the lookout for an easy hook-up via the Internet. You've got a virulently hateful local Christian church which spews hatred against pretty much everyone who isn't a member of the church. You've got the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms out for a big law-enforcement score. You've got corrupt, inept, and easily manipulated local law enforcement.
These ingredients make for a heady cocktail of horror and mayhem once they've been stirred.
Smith gets some fine performances out of his cast, especially John Goodman as an increasingly bewildered ATF agent, his good intentions destroyed at every turn by power-hungry superiors, inept local law enforcement, and junior agents following orders. Michael Parks of Twin Peaks plays the cult leader as a disarmingly charming, creepy monster of religious intolerance.
It's a funny movie at points, punctuated by sudden and awful violence. And even some of the violence becomes funny, at times because of its very suddenness and messiness. Hopefully Smith will make more movies like this -- it's a minor classic. Highly recommended.
David Lynch: The Art Life (2016): directed by Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, and Olivia Neegard-Holm; starring David Lynch (Himself): Born in 1946 in Missoula, Montana, David Lynch would have a semi-peripatetic childhood, living in a couple of places in the Pacific Northwest before his family moved to Virginia when he was in his early teens. In this odd, informative, enjoyable bio-documentary, Lynch rhapsodizes about childhood in the Pacific Northwest while also revealing a couple of sources for one famous movie scene and one enigmatic character.
Lynch isn't here to talk about his work after Eraserhead. The documentary has lengthy interview segments in which Lynch discusses his childhood and young adulthood as a painter who almost stumbled into film-making, only to discover that he loved it. We're shown montages of Lynch's painting and other artwork, early movie work, and some out-takes from Lynch's breakthrough movie, Eraserhead.
If you like Lynch, this movie is about as essential as a movie can get. Lynch moves between frankness and obliqueness in his inimitable, gnomic way. The art is extraordinary. One wishes for more but is grateful for what one gets in these 90 minutes. Long live America's greatest living film-maker. Highly recommended.
Vampyr (1931): Loosely based on J. Sheridan Le Fanu's "The Room In the Dragon Volant" and "Carmilla" by writers Christian Jul and Carl Dreyer; directed by Carl Dreyer; starring Julian West (Allan Grey), Maurice Schutz (Father), Rena Mandel (Gisele), Sybille Schmitz (Leone), Jan Hieronimko (The Doctor), and Henriette Gerard (The Vampyr): Carl (best known as the director of the excruciating classic The Passion of Joan of Arc) Dreyer's intentionally nightmare-like, early sound film remains one of a handful of the most unusual vampire movies ever made. There's a fairly tight, simple plot. But that plot is secondary to the images that come and go, images that often defy the plot.
Does our protagonist have a number of dreams, waking or otherwise, during his pursuit of a vampire? What is up with that creepy doll in the corner of that shot? What the Hell is going on with all the shadows doing weird stuff? And so on, and so forth. It's a languorous movie in the best possible way, best watched late at night. Highly recommended.
Eraserhead (1977): written and directed by David Lynch; starring Jack Nance (Henry Spencer), Charlotte Stewart (Mary X), Allen Joseph (Mr. X), Jeanne Bates (Mrs. X), Judith Roberts (Beautiful Girl Across the Hall), and Laurel Near (Lady In the Radiator): Watching David Lynch's first full-length movie -- filmed over the course of several years! -- is always a disturbing treat, but Twin Peaks: The Return makes it almost mandatory today.
That terrific, innovative, terrifying miniseries (maxiseries?) echoes with the sounds of Eraserhead. Literally, at certain points, given the sound design of the two projects. Eraserhead is a necessity on its own, of course, a masterpiece of horrors cloachal, bodily, existential, and cosmic. It remains as essential now as it was 40 years ago, one of the crowning moments of 'Art Cinema' and cult horror and WTF movie-making. Highly recommended.
The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016) by Mark Frost: Mark Frost's canonical (as in, 'It's a part of the series lore') book is creepy, informative fun. It could almost stand on its own, though in that case it doesn't exactly have a conclusion.
In a nod to the documentary strain of horror fiction, The Secret History of Twin Peaks deploys journal entries, diary excerpts, newspaper articles, and first-person testimonials and reporting to supply David Lynch and Mark Frost's fictional town with a convincingly weird history as a place where the walls between the normal world and the world of demons and aliens have worn very, very thin.
The conceit here is that much of what we're reading was found in a lockbox at an undisclosed location. It's been assigned by FBI assistant director Gordon Cole (played by Lynch on the TV series) to a younger agent with the initials 'T.P.' to annotate. T.P.'s notes appear in the margins.
The contents of the lockbox (or 'dossier') were assembled by an initially unnamed character from Twin Peaks (the show and the town). That unnamed character (dubbed 'the Archivist' by T.P.) also comments on the various pieces assembled in the dossier while hinting and then confirming that much of the dossier was assembled by another character from Twin Peaks. Got all that?
Frost brings real historical figures (Lewis of Lewis and Clark; UFO investigators J. Allen Hynek and Kenneth Arnold; President Nixon; Jackie Gleason (!)...) and real events into the secret history of demon- and angel-haunted Twin Peaks, to enjoyably creepy and expansive effect. It seems as if Frost is much more into UFO' s than Lynch, making The Secret History of Twin Peaks a somewhat different experience than the show. And that's a good thing. Everything herein dovetails nicely with what we've seen on Twin Peaks without over-writing anything.
Frost supplies background for many of the characters of Twin Peaks, from the Mayor and his brother (remember them? Well, they're major players here!) to Major Briggs and Dr. Jacoby. The dossier ends when the Archivist apparently disappears in 1989, a few days after the events in the series end. We do discover the fate of a couple of characters from the show. However, a gap of about 27 years is indeed left between the end of dossier and Twin Peaks: The Return. Some of that gap is filled in by T.P.'s marginal notes, as she or he is writing just days before the events chronicled in Twin Peaks: The Return begin.
In all, this is an impressive addition to the world of documentary-style horror and fantasy fiction. If you've watched Twin Peaks: The Return, you'll probably guess the identities of our archivist and the young FBI agent reading his work in 2016. You may be surprised when the UFO stuff starts flying, or when American magazine editor Raymond Palmer's The Shaver Mysteries suddenly makes an appearance. L. Ron Hubbard shows up as well. And Aleister Crowley, and so on, and so forth. Highly recommended.
The Hidden (1987): written by Jim Kouf; directed by Jack Sholder; starring Kyle MacLachlan (Lloyd Gallagher), Michael Nouri (Sgt. Tom Beck), Claudia Christian (Brenda Lee), Clu Gulager (Lt. Flynn), Ed O'Ross (Detective Willis), Richard Brooks (Detective Sanchez), Clarence Felder (Lt. Masterson), and Chris Mulkey (DeVries): A great cult movie of the 1980's that should be as fondly remembered as The Terminator, but isn't. Plot revelations are part of the fun, so I'll only say that mismatched cop and FBI partners Michael Nouri and Kyle MacLachlan are terrific as they pursue a puzzling series of normal citizens who suddenly turn into crazy killers.
A great cast of character actors helps elevate the movie, as do Claudia Christian's killer stripper, some extremely good creature effects, and a narrative that's lean and compact. Science-fiction historians can note the movie's extreme similarity to both Hal Clement's classic sf novel Needle and Michael Shea's 1980 novella "The Autopsy." Twin Peaks fans may note that MacLachlan's performance here seems like a practice run for FBI Agent Dale Cooper. Highly recommended.
Ouija: based on the Hasbro board game; written by Juliet Snowden and Stiles White; directde by Stiles White; starring Olivia Cooke (Laine Morris), Ana Coto (Sarah Morris), Douglas Smith (Pete), and Daren Kagasoff (Trevor) (2014): This wouldn't be the worst horror movie in the world if it were the first horror movie someone ever saw. The scares are pretty tame and the 'twist' ending stereotypically lame, but the young actors are surprisingly good. The direction underplays everything, leading to a bit of dullness.
That Ouija is actually a licensed Hasbro board game is probably unknown to most people. What's surprising in a contemporary movie of this sort is that no one uses the Internet to research ghost-busting. What's divertingly stupid about this movie is that no one researches anything useful. One interesting tic of the script is that the teens are on their own in a world in which parents and helpful adults are almost as rare as in a Peanuts cartoon. As those ubiquitous Blumhouse horror joints go, far from the worst. Very lightly recommended.
