THE QUARANTINE HAUNTINGS

Stars: Lauren Clark, Elizabeth Wiltshire, Darren Moss, Jack Marshall, Jenna Edwards, Bailey Skelton, Peter Sumner and Troy Harrison.
Writers: Bianca Biasi, Rebekah Biasi, Arnold Perez, Josh Sambono and Stephanie Talevski.
Director: Bianca Biasi and Arnold Perez.

Rating: 3/5

Co-directors Bianca Biasi and Arnold Perez deliver a skilfully crafted calling card pic with their psychological thriller/ghost story mash-up, The Quarantine Hauntings. Exhibiting a solid understanding of genre machinations, the pair make up for a lack of narrative inspiration with sufficiently solid scares. Cable TV and digi-download viewership amongst those who appreciate high ambition on a low budget is assured.

A hectic 24-hour handheld shoot at the infamous Quarantine Station on Sydney’s most northern headland is central to both the plot and the pic’s marketing. (Urban legends have proven popular of late with Oz filmmakers; Carlo Ledesma’s The Tunnel [2011] explored the abandoned subterranean network under Sydney, while Dane Millerd took on the legend of the Yowie in There’s Something in The Pillaga [2014]). Although fully restored for the tourist trade, the old hospital site once housed the seriously ill in archaic conditions during the nation’s early colonial period. The high mortality rate led to its reputation as one of the east coast’s most haunted sites, home to several spectres that have allegedly appeared to the unsuspecting for many years.

One such apparition is Jolene (Dalisha Cristina), aka ‘The Girl in The Pink Dress’, a 9 year-old who passed away as medicos bickered over her treatment. Seen in flashback (with veteran character actor Peter Sumner supplying some old-school villainy), Biasi and Perez employ slick post-production trickery to create a nightmarishly immersive vision of poor Jolene’s final moments.

Thematically, the film adheres (at times, tenuously) to such horror genre staples as grief, memory and regret. Key protagonist Jasmine (a particularly fine Lauren Clark) continues to struggle with the death of her father; bff Skye (Elizabeth Wiltshire) offers positivity, guiding her through boyfriend dramas (Daren Moss’ douche-y Cameron) and parental discord. Always nearby is Skye’s younger brother Blake and his offsider Zac (respectively, Bailey Skelton and Jack Marshall) in the smart-mouth comic relief roles that would have been played by Corey’s Haim and Feldman thirty years ago, and little sister Eva (an underused Jenna Edwards).  

The reckless recital of an ancient incantation summons Jolene from beyond and the angry spirit seeks out kindred dark soul Jasmine, who has holed up with the group of friends to sleep off antidepressant medication. One moment of true terror, a darkly lit scene during which the extent of Jolene and Jasmine supernatural bond is revealed, is the stuff of nightmares. The unfolding of broader plot points becomes both overly familiar and unnecessarily convoluted, but the performances overall are natural and engaging and few of the clichés will register with the film’s target teenage demographic.

The second and third acts combine lots of references to classics of the genre – a character notes that the diary that contains the spell “looks like the Necronomicon”; Cameron’s late night snacking turns into a homage to a similar scene in Poltergeist; and, Jolene’s muted colour and long black hair unavoidably recall the Yurei spirit seen in J-horror classics Ringu and Ju-On: The Grudge.

Also embraced are the ‘shaky-cam’ techniques and ‘real-world’ lensing (security cameras, mobile phones, etc) that have been refined in standard bearers The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. Most of the late night panic at the quarantine station is deliberately hard to decipher; the result is more disorienting than terrifying, but achieves enough chills to satisfy.

SCREEN-SPACE was a grateful guest of the production at The Quarantine Hauntings premiere, held at the Quarantine Station site ahead of a limited local theatrical season.

LOST SOUL: THE DOOMED JOURNEY OF RICHARD STANLEY'S ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU

Featuring: Richard Stanley, Marco Hofscneider, Fairuza Balk, Robert Shaye, Graham ‘Grace’ Walker, Rob Morrow and Edward R Pressman.
Director: David Gregory.

Screening at the 2014 A Night of Horror / Fantastic Planet Film Festival. Session details to be annouced soon. 

Rating: 4.5/5

A riveting, rollicking study of counter-culture creativity clashing with the early days of Hollywood’s corporatization, David Gregory’s Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau transcends the standard ‘making-of’ format and emerges more an ‘undoing-of’ study in psychological torment and film sector hubris.

Gregory’s filmography cites over 100 DVD-extra snapshots of the directorial mind at work, as well as the highly-acclaimed features, Forget Everything You Have Ever Seen: The World of Santa Sangre (2011) and What’s in the Basket (2012), a retrospective study of Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case trilogy. This vast experience has clearly proven to be the perfect training ground, as his latest ranks alongside Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1999) and Lost in La Mancha (2002) as an acutely penetrative account of film artistry in turmoil.

Documentaries that chart the hurdles faced by ambitious film projects have been plentiful of late. Like Frank Pavich’s excellent Jodorowsky’s Dune, Lost Soul… is afforded the good grace and fortune of having a truly eccentric visionary at its core – underground artist/philosopher/academic/author and film director Richard Stanley, a brilliant, enigmatic presence whose plummy accent and intelligent gaze emerge from beneath the broad brim of his trademark Stetson.

Stanley found favour with some of the more adventurous LA executives after his 1990 sci-fi metal-noir oddity Hardware and trippy serial-killer western Dust Devil. He boldly pitched a fresh version of his lifelong obsession– H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau, the nightmarish tale of man’s inner beast becoming externalized. Given a surprising degree of free rein for a newcomer to Hollywood, Stanley’s small, dark vision was soon spiralling out of control, the self-serving influence of boardroom bullies to the harsh physical realities of shooting in the Queensland rainforest proving to be just two of the elements that led to Stanley’s descent into his own heart of darkness.

Present is the undeniably dark pleasure one derives from watching a slow-motion train wreck take shape. Cast (Fairuza Balk, Marco Hofschneider, one-time lead Rob Morrow and several Australian support players) and crew (from LA maven Robert Shaye to legendary Aussie production designer Graham ‘Grace’ Walker) flesh out the reality of events that have long since formed into legend. Thoroughly entertaining are the accounts of Marlon Brando’s grand eccentricity, replacement director John Frankenheimer’s methodical boorishness and Val Kilmer’s utter dick-ishness.

But it is the broader insight that Gregory explores in Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s The Island of Dr Moreau that proves most satisfying. Stanley’s planned film was perhaps the last of its kind – a wild, unsafe gamble on a director’s mad, complex, thematically rich studio tent-pole. It shares a pedigree with the likes of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil or Jeunet’s & Caro’s The City of Lost Children - expensive visions left bloodied by horrible births that clawed their way to cult status. To Hollywood’s great shame, Richard Stanley’s vision of Wells’ hellish utopia never materialized, but its legacy makes for an appropriately insane real-life narrative every bit as brilliantly mad and maddening as the fiction promised to be.

THE GREEN INFERNO

Stars: Lorenza Izzo, Ariel Levy, Aaron Burns, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Magda Apanowicz, Daryl Sabara, Ignacia Allamand, Nicholas Martinez, Sky Ferreira and Antonieta Pari.
Writers: Eli Roth and Nicolas Lopez.
Director: Eli Roth.

Rating: 1.5/5

The grand-scale cannibal epic that sly marketeers have been hinting at is nowhere to be found in Eli Roth’s low-rent, low-IQ disappointment, The Green Inferno. Touted as a loving homage to Italian grindhouse hero Ruggerio Deodata’s 1980 cult shocker Cannibal Holocaust, Roth’s limp, one-note adventure plays more like a half-baked piss-take than the work of someone with any knowledge of, let alone respect for, the anthropophagus genre.

Providing the film’s only inherent worth is Lorenza Izzo as Justine, a restless freshman sharing a dorm room with her gormless bff, Kaycee (Sky Ferreira). Disgusted by a classroom presentation on female genital mutilation (surely a course requirement, though everyone acts like the images were just sprung on them), Justine is in the frame of mind to be convinced by smitten, schlubby do-gooder Jonah (Aaron Burns) to attend a campus activist group session led by the charismatic douche-bag, Alejandro (Ariel Levy).

A bat of his eyelids later and Justine is bound for South America, part of a naïve but energised group of protesters determined to highlight the region’s deforestation. A dozen nobodies padlocked to trucks and trees to spread the word about the already well-documented practices of indigenous habitat destruction seems a tad pointless, so some techno-babble about uploading the real-time confrontation for the whole world to see is inserted. In what proves to be just one of the film’s shortcomings, The Green Inferno is peopled almost entirely by imbeciles, burdened with execrable dialogue. These twenty-somethings are smart enough to be accepted into college but too dumb to research their logging industry targets before jetting off into the Amazonian jungles. “You mean, they’ll have guns?” says one wide-eyed moron, just before they board a boat to head upstream.

Long overdue action in the form of a well-staged plane crash finally spins the film on the narrative axis the target audience has been waiting for– the bloody deaths of non-essential support players and the insertion of our protagonists into unfriendly jungle. Thankfully, Roth finds some mojo and moves his players swiftly; in a whirlwind sequencing of post-crash carnage and poison darts, Justine and her surviving activists (which now include ‘Spy Kids’ alumni Daryl Sabara and pretty blonde screamer Kirby Bliss Blanton) are soon in the clutches of a red-skinned native tribe and the festivities begin.

Gorehounds will be happy that the film finally gets down to some bloodletting; by the half way mark, tongues, eyes, limbs and torsos have featured. Those new to either cannibal film lore or Roth’s gleeful depiction of acts of dismemberment will squirm, but the tone of The Green Inferno doesn’t allow for any sort of serious investment on the audiences’ part. Just as no character earns our empathy, nor do any of the acts of cannibalism prove truly shocking. It is one of several misjudgements on the productions part that creates such a chasm between it and Deodata’s film; the Italian’s camera cast an almost objective eye over the horrors, while Roth’s all but screams “Wow, look what I’m doing!”

Devolving into pointless padding (Justine’s plunge into the Amazon is entirely unwarranted) and episodic fight-or-flight diversions, The Green Inferno’s most diabolical liability is tone. Is Roth’s work a satire on spoilt rich kids and the privilege they blindly yield? Why are there passages of wacky black comedy in my cannibal movie (the ‘bag of pot’ sequence is plain stupid; it’s ‘overseas’, remember, so we gotta get a diarrhoea joke in there…)? There is meant to be humour in the notion that the traditional tribal practices the protesters are trying to save proves to be their undoing, right? So why is it barely referenced? And does the tribe (whose ‘remote outpost’ looks like a quiet corner of Central Park) exist only to prepare and eat human flesh? Little else seems to be going on for the whole time the captives are there.

Of greater interest than anything in the film would be to consider The Green Inferno as part of Roth’s broader filmography. To date, his films present the ‘uncivilised world’ as a dangerous threat to those who are privileged, collegiate, good time go-getters. His heroes aren’t always the brightest of bulbs, but they are America’s future; so far, they have been threatened by the swampy backwaters of their own homeland (Cabin Fever), the horrors of Eastern Europe (the Hostel films) and, in his latest work, the ‘savages’ of South America. In each case, powerful forces not aligned to the vision of the upwardly mobile represent pure evil (here, personified by the majestically demonic Antonieta Pari as ‘The Elder’); myopic villains driven to exploit those that represent the best the US can and will offer. There is a forceful horror at work in The Green Inferno, but perhaps it is not the flesh-eaters of the rainforest.

SXTAPE

Stars: Caitlin Folley, Ian Duncan, Diana Garcia, Daniel Farado, Julie Marcus and Eric Neil Guiterrez.
Writer: Eric Reese.
Director: Bernard Rose.

Rating: 3/5

Although the ‘shakie-cam’ found-footage horror genre prides itself on a style-less aesthetic, the craftsmanship of a director with highly-regarded credentials is plainly evident in Bernard Rose’s LA-set haunted-hospital shocker, sxtape. This latest addition to the Brit’s eclectic career is as far from his period dramas (Immortal Beloved; Anna Karenina; The Kreutzer Sonata) as any film could be, but is steeped in the gritty, grimy minutiae of urban decay and chillingly well-defined supernatural components that made his breakout hit Candyman an enduring cult favourite.

Like the 1992 film that introduced horror fans to Tony Todd’s iconic ‘Man in the Mirror’ boogeyman, Rose finds old-school scares in the heart of the modern metropolis. Back then, it was the Chicago projects; this time around, it is in an abandoned sanitarium in the wilds of inner-city Los Angeles. A vibrant blonde artist named Jill (Caitlin Folley) is being followed about town by her horny new beau, Adam (the barely-glimpsed Ian Duncan), who is recording her as she prepares to launch her first exhibit. Sweet time together fills most of the film’s first act, which bounces from boho-loft bonking to playful public giggles and back again; Rose’s film takes a broadminded approach to energetic and frank lovemaking that will attract tough censor attention in some territories.

Adam surprises Jill by taking her to a dingy old mansion to get her thoughts on the place as a gallery space. He surprises her further when, as some kind of bad joke, he straps her to a guerney and briefly leaves her briefly; this allows for the film’s first big scare and the beginning of Jill and Adam’s descent into the vengeful spiritual memory of the building. The plotting comparisons to The Shining grow increasingly apparent (Rose references the ‘naked hottie/old hag’ mirror moment from Kubrick’s film at one point), though it is hardly the first to do so and ultimately carves out its own satisfying narrative path.

Just as fellow veteran Barry Levinson showed on his criminally-underseen handheld horror work The Bay, the format can reinvigorate a director who has spent a career grinding through the traditionally cumbersome production process. Rose held his own camera and cut his own footage on sxtape and the confidence of an old-pro given free reign comes through in every well-timed scare. He has major assets in leading lady Folley, whose all-or-nothing performance goes from darling free-spirit to bloody, shrieking banshee, and production designer Bradd Fillmann, whose vision of a hellish hospital landscape is clearly influenced by those first-person horror games that I refuse to play because they terrify me.

sxtape never fully overcomes the inherent problems that dog the found-footage film - why don’t they just leave? why would they keep filming? why doesn’t the camera battery run out? who adds the post-production elements? The film has its own unanswered conundrums, such as who would still  be running power to the clearly derelict building, although the biggest logical misstep in Eric Reese’s script comes in the form of a prologue in which a cop questions a bloody and distressed Jill; if she is seen to have survived and the fate of her companions is in no doubt, who finds and watches the footage?

Fortunately, Rose and his team generate enough goodwill with some solid scares and a truly icky final frame to overcome any shortcomings. sxtape breathes some fresh air into the handheld-horror genre via the skill of a deft, proven journeyman filmmaker who is clearly enjoying himself.