If you've searched around the weird side of Youtube long enough, you've probably run into the short films of Robert Morgan. Morgan has been uploading his bizarre stop-motion animation to the web since at least 2009. Shorts like “The Cat with Hands,” “The Separation,” and “Belial's Dream” are characterized by disturbingly fleshy puppets engaging in unsettling behavior. I find some of his films quite entertaining and some borderline incoherent. Still, there's no denying that Morgan is a unique voice in the genre. Morgan's work has played in theaters before – he contributed a segment to “The ABCs of Death 2,” for one example – but he made his feature length debut this year. As the title indicates, “Stopmotion” utilizes his trademark style of animation into a bigger story.
Suzanne Blake is a stop-motion animator of some esteem. However, in her old age, she has develop arthritis that prevents her from moving and sculpting the models. She enlists her daughter, Ella, to complete her latest film. When Blake has a stroke, Ella is compelled to finish her mom's work. Moving into an isolated apartment, she gets to work... But is soon visited by a little girl, who encourages her to begin work on a different film. This one tells the story of a young girl pursued by a monster called the Ash Man. The new project takes over Ella's life, the woman going to increasingly disturbing lengths to finish telling this story. Before long, the lines between fact and fiction, reality and hallucination, begin to blur.
Upon this extremely unsettling foundation, Morgan and co-writer Robin King have built a narrative about a descent into madness. As Ella grows more obsessed with completing her film, the more cut-off from other people she becomes. The minute the little girl starts to intrude into Ella's apartment, the audience has an idea of where this is going. While at a night club, she takes some acid and has a creepy vision involving a ventriloquist dummy. “Stopmotion” continues on like that. There's no doubt that the visuals “Stopmotion” employs to show this decomposition are unnerving. Notable moments have Ella's legs turning into clay, her digging through her own thigh, and the Ash Man appearing at her door. Ultimately, “Stopmotion” lacks the sympathetic element similar, but superior, movies like “May” or “Excision” bring to their unhinged female protagonists. Ella is so remote and focused on creating her films, the movie rarely stepping outside her apartment, that we don't get a sense of any other social isolation or awkwardness she might feel. It makes her fall towards madness, murder, and self-destruction a lot less meaningful.
I certainly can't deny that “Stopmotion” is ambitious. Outside of its mixture of live action and animation – surely a challenge of its own – the movie tackles a number of themes. From the beginning, Ella's mother refers to her as “puppet.” This term of endearment barely hides the truth of a controlling mother who sees her own child as nothing but an extension of herself. It's clear that part of Ella's madness is spurned on by the grief of loosing a parent she has a lot of mixed feelings about. The film is also about the artist's relationship with their output. At what point are we controlling our creations and when do they start to control us? Artist routinely sacrifice everything for the sake of their work, suggesting an uneven push-and-pull exists between the maker and the made. When you live and breathe your work, it will consumed you eventually, which “Stopmotion” makes rather literal by the end.
Hammer Studio's greatest stars both always seemed somewhat reluctant to accept their status as horror icons. Christopher Lee eventually grew to resent the studio that made him famous. Though he was always professional about the many genre films he continued to appear in, you often got the impression that he'd rather be playing different roles. Peter Cushing seemed a little more willing to accept his typecasting. In his autobiography, he wrote that “Who wants to see me as Hamlet? Very few. But millions want to see me as Frankenstein, so that's the one I do.” And so Cushing continued to headline monster movies. Such as 1975's “The Ghoul,” a somewhat late attempt to replicate the Hammer formula by Tyburn Film Productions. The comparison seemed deliberate on the studio's behalf, as they got Freddie Francis to direct and Veronica Carlson to co-star.
Daphne and Geoffrey throw a wild party for their friends in the British countryside. This soon escalates to a car race, in their 1920s automobiles, across the moors. As the fog thickens, the couple get lost and run out of gas. Daphne looks for help and soon ends up at the mansion of a mysterious man called Lawrence. A heartbroken widower, Lawrence is clearly keeping some sort of secret. His Indian housekeeper Ayah gives ominous warnings and prays at a creepy statue. The sleazy groundskeeper, Tom, seems untrustworthy. After staying in the house for the night, Daphne is murdered by an unseen occupant of the home. As Geoffrey and their other friends eventually make it to the house, it becomes clear that Lawrence is keeping a murderous, cannibalistic monster locked up in his attic.
The only thing holding this rough assembly of incidents together are two decent performances. Peter Cushing plays Lawrence not as a sinister villain hiding a dark secret but as a heartbroken family man desperate to hold onto the past. Cushing gets misty-eyed when delivering monologues about his deceased wife and his missing son. Within the film, it's all foreshadowing. However, Cushing made this movie shortly after his wife died, a heartbreak that he would never recover from. No wonder Lawrence's tear-strewn desperation seems so raw and realistic. The actor was experiencing the same emotions. Opposite Cushing is John Hurt, only thirty-four at the time but as raspy sounding as ever. The film never quite justifies what Tom is doing at this home, especially since he's clearly a creep. He steals food from the kitchen, harasses every woman he meets, and seems to delight in frightening anyone who comes near him. Hurt goes way over-the-top to play such an aggressively unlikable character, growling and hooting all throughout the film. He's honestly much more of an antagonist than the titular green-faced monster, which only appears in a few scenes.
The ghoul in the attic isn't fully revealed until the final scene. Once you get a look at it, you realize this was probably because of its underwhelming appearance and not to build suspense. The cannibalism element is referenced a few times but you never see the monster munching on any flesh. I'm also not sure that this man-eating habit qualifies this creature as a ghoul exactly, since they traditionally only eat dead flesh. They're also, mythologically, Arabian and not Indian. I doubt the filmmakers cared too much about that. To learn that Freddie Francis directed this one as a favor to his son – who produced it – is not horribly surprising. There's some decent stabbing scenes and Cushing and Hurt do their best to elevate the material. Yet "The Ghoul" remains a supremely underwritten and unfocused attempt at Victorian horror. [5/10]
“Something Borrowed, Something Blue” is about engaged but broke couple Ryan and Alison. They receive a letter from her estranged father, Frank, an ailing millionaire eager to make amends. They arrive at his mansion for brunch and Alison quickly leaves in a huff. That's when Frank reveals to Ryan that he has an eldritch abomination in his basement, that must be fed every fifteen years or chaos will be unleashed on the world. If Ryan continues to feed the beast, he and Alison will inherit Frank's fortune. And the deadline is their wedding day. ”Doodles” concerns Angela, a struggling cartoonist trying to get hired at famous magazine Timeless. She has her cartoon stolen by another woman in the waiting room. That night, she doodles a gory end on a picture of the woman... Only for that ghastly fate to actually befall her. Angela soon finds her drawings have the power to end people's lives, using this ability to knock off her rivals.
“Something Borrowed, Something Blue” has the classic morality tale style set-up we expect from “Creepshow” and its predecessors. Ryan, a seemingly seasonable man, is given a choice: Commit one amoral act and be on easy street for the rest of his life or stick by his ethics and remain poor. It's the kind of moral conundrum that anyone can relate to. This also means Ryan going behind his wife's back, or so it seems. The main attraction “Something Borrowed, Something Blue” has to longtime horror fans is that Tom Atkins, genre icon and featured player in the original “Creepshow,” plays Frank. There's definitely some fun seeing Atkins, stately in his old age, play such a nasty guy. Most notably when he gives Ryan an ultimatum.
“Doodles,” meanwhile, might be too simple. It rushes through Angela's arc too quickly. She doesn't mean to cause the first two deaths, unaware of the effects her doodles have on the real world. Within the span of a single scene, she comes around to accepting this power, justifying her actions, and being willing to kill again to protect herself. Anja Savcic is likable but the script lets her down. The best thing about this episode is a decent twist ending, making sure evil is done unto evil as always. There's also a gnarly exploding head and some nice, comic book style colors. Which sometimes feels like an afterthought in this show. [Something Borrowed, Something Blue: 6/10 / Doodles: 6/10]
“Death Becomes Her” was the kick-off to the second half of “Chucky's” third season, though it's fairly low-key for a “mid-season premiere.” Chucky's declining health has him facing down the existential crisis of his own mortality. Lexy patches things up with Grant. Jake and Devon travel to the voodoo clinic Chucky previously visited, learning that the murderous doll is indeed dying. President Collins begins to see the ghost of his late son, Joshua, around the White House while Charlotte begins to crack under the mounting pressures of the cover-up. Meanwhile, in Texas, Tiffany/Jennifer Tilly continues to plot her escape from prison before a desperate phone call from Chucky ends up giving the doll his most fiendish idea yet.
“Death Becomes Her' is one of those episodes without much of a driving point of its own. It splits up the cast and has a bunch of different characters pursuing different goals. It's very much a middle-of-the-season episode in that regard. Of all these competing subplots, the President seeing the ghost of his dead son and the First Lady being anxious about conspiracies is easily the most disposable. I guess the haunting scenes are mildly creepy – including some decent camera movements and a screaming flag – though I don't know where the show is going with that. At the very least, Jake and Devon's road trip builds up to a nice moment the show has been teasing all season. The two finally consummate their relationship, in a neon hotel room to the tune of “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. The conversation afterwards is genuinely quite sweet, continuing to show the surprisingly sincere handling of the young queer romance at the center of this show.
It is interesting that, after seven movies and two seasons of a TV show, the “Chucky” franchise has never gotten into the mechanics of its magical rules much. I can't say I've ever had that many questions about the arcane magic that makes Chucky's shenanigans possible. Season three has really devoted itself to figuring these things out. The scene where Jake and Devon meet with the doctor, who continues to be a dryly comedic presence, quickly gets into a conversation about the nature of the soul and spirit. Though I'm betting actual practitioner of Voodou do not find this show to be an especially sensitive portrayal of Damballah. Anyway, “Death Becomes Her' is a middle chapter episode that still has enough funny, interesting scenes to keep me watching. [7/10]
No comments:
Post a Comment