Hippies, vampires and the spirit of David Lynch loom large
Writer-director Peter Strickland cites a viewing of David Lynch's nightmarish Eraserhead ("this strange, beautiful piece of atmosphere"), followed by years of triple bills at the King's Cross Scala ("New York underground, sleazy European art porn, creepy Italian horror"), as his cinematic inspiration. It's easy to imagine the creator of Katalin Varga (2009, Artificial Eye, 15) gorging himself on such exotica. From the brooding, amorphous guilt of Lynch's industrial noisescapes to the emotive violence of so much "exploitation" fare, Strickland clearly appreciates the strange mysteries of cinema's most dark and troubling dreams.
His eye-opening first feature is a gothic-inflected Romanian tragedy in which the vampiric spectre of Transylvania's prince of darkness is replaced by an altogether more human monster. Hilda Péter is mesmerising as the innocent outcast, banished from her village when her husband discovers that he is not the father of her son. With horse, cart and nine-year-old in tow, Katalin sets off across the haunting vistas of the Carpathians, hellbent on revenge, the landscape almost singing to her as she goes – an eerie murder ballad. But when she finds the beast who brutally scarred her years ago, will she be able to plunge a stake into his heart? Does revenge or redemption cast the longer shadow? Brooding, sensual and brilliantly unsettling, Strickland's film moves seamlessly between horror and wonderment, a visually enrapturing modern myth with its head in the darkening clouds and its feet firmly planted in the soil of a spine-tingling soundtrack.
While it may be hard to imagine a "good Megan Fox movie", Jennifer's Body (2009, 20th Century Fox, 15) comes close to being just that. Admittedly, Fox herself is the least of this satirical high-school slasher's virtues, its main strength being a spunkily genre-literate script from Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody. Likable Amanda Seyfried takes centre stage as "Needy", the allegedly dowdy teen (clearly Cody's cipher) whose best/worst friend turns out to be a man-eater, in every sense.
Like all the best teen-terror romps (from Carrie to Ginger Snaps), the supernatural elements are based upon down-to-earth adolescent anxieties. There's real recognisable bite in the spectre of Jennifer's dawning vampirism ("she's evil… and I don't just mean high school evil"), and the best moments combine sarky humour and creeping horror with post-Mean Girls aplomb. Sadly, it doesn't quite sustain the initial promise as prom night looms and subtextual meat gives way to more formulaic softcore scares. Yet there's plenty here to entertain young-at-heart horror fans (both male and female), who will appreciate Cody's evident love of the genre and hopefully respond with appropriate good cheer.
The cover for the mirthless dirge-fest The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard (2009, Pathé, 15) cites a review which proclaims that this is "as funny as any Will Ferrell or Judd Apatow film". Talk about damning with faint praise. What scant laughs are on offer here are in fact duly stolen by co-producer Ferrell, who drops in for a supportive cameo involving skydiving, Abe Lincoln and dildos (readers are invited to insert their own cheap knob gag here). Elsewhere it's a chuckle-free zone as Jeremy Piven and co attempt to do for cowboy car salesmanship what Blades of Glory did for figure skating: make it seem funny, ballsy, quirky, comic but ultimately (and not entirely ironically) uplifting. Sadly, it is none of these things, at least not on the evidence of The Goods.
It's hard to know what exactly attracted Ang Lee to the hippy-dippy comedy of Taking Woodstock (2009, Universal, 15), a tale of peace, love and understanding which is somewhat hobbled by being quite so benign. Everyone involved seems absolutely lovely – from the quaint Catskills townsfolk whose rural idyll is overrun by vagrant longhairs, to the cops, the TV squares, the bread-head promoters, the security guards (Liev Schreiber in scene-stealing drag) and, of course, the sauntering druggy peaceniks themselves, who are peculiarly polite and well-behaved throughout. OK, so Imelda Staunton's marauding mum starts out screechy and shrieky, but even she mellows under the tide of niceness and a large plate of hash brownies. In knowing counterpoint to Mike Wadleigh's Woodstock, we never actually get to see the festival itself, Lee's focus being on the crowd which seems to exist in a bubble of Brigadoon-like bliss. Only a heavy-handed closing reference to the impending catastrophe of Altamont (which gave birth to the Maysles's terrifying Gimme Shelter) strikes a note of doom – otherwise it's nostalgic sunshine and light all the way.
With Julien Temple's wonderfully gritty Oil City Confidential playing in cinemas and duly raising the bar of the contemporary "rock doc", it's tempting to be snotty and scornful about Michael Jackson's This is It (2009, Sony, PG), a hagiographic montage of rehearsal footage from Jacko's unfulfilled final tour. Yet despite never being intended for public viewing, the resultant patchwork is a peculiarly charming and occasionally poignant affair. Jackson was clearly pacing himself and rarely hits his moonwalking stride, gesturing towards dance steps rather than throwing himself into them, and occasionally talking rather than actually singing the songs. Yet anyone who felt a morbid tingle at the posthumous release of Elvis's "Twelfth of Never" rehearsal tapes will be similarly intrigued by the apparent intimacy of these "non-performances". Of course the real showman here is Kenny Ortega, heroic helmsman of the High School Musical series and the guiding hand behind this ambitious enterprise which somehow weaves a silk purse out of a potential sow's arse. Go Kenny!
